Page:The Melanesians Studies in their Anthropology and Folklore.djvu/196

174 deceased great men, whose ghosts visiting their accustomed abodes would be pleased at marks of memory and affection, and irritated by disrespect. There was no notion of the ghost of the dead taking up his abode in the image, nor was the image supposed to have any supernatural efficacy in itself. In any oha in Malanta may be seen an image of a shark, a sword-fish, or a bonito, before which portions of food are placed; and these figures will be said to be fathers, grand-fathers, ancestors of those who thus respect them. These are indeed receptacles of the dead, not of their spirits, but of their mortal remains or relics; such cannot be called idols. Although too they sometimes make other images and give the names of the dead to them by way of remembrance, they do not pray or sacrifice at such images, nor are they thought holy. In Florida a rudely-shaped image of a man might often have been seen in a sacred place near a village or by the sea-shore, with cocoa-nuts tied to it or food laid at its feet; this would be a tindalo, an image representing some powerful man deceased; the food would be for him to eat; the image was sacred. That is to say, the image was a memorial of some tindalo, and was not thought to have power in itself, or to be inhabited by the ghost of the departed. Images representing a tindalo were also cut on the posts of the canoe-houses, mere memorials not much regarded, and approached without respect.

The stocks set up in Santa Cruz to represent the dead are the simplest of memorials. In the Banks' Islands tree-fern trunks cut into very rude figures of men were often seen—memorials made at funeral feasts, having really no sacred character at all. In the same islands the images carried about at the Suqe feasts, and afterwards set up in the eating-places proper to the rank they represent, may well be taken for idols by those who are not acquainted with their meaning; and so indeed may the figure, the nule, into which the post of a house is cut, the building of which is celebrated by a kolekole. In the New Hebrides, at Ambrym, images of the dead whose death-feasts are to be celebrated are very elaborately prepared, not with any attempt at representing the