Page:The Melanesians Studies in their Anthropology and Folklore.djvu/216

194 Ordeals, Poison, Curses. In all these whatever is done is believed to be effected by the mana of spirits and ghosts, acting through, various media, and brought to bear by secret forms of words to which the power to work is given by the names of the spirits or ghosts, or of the living or lifeless things to which this mysterious influence is attached.

(1) Sickness. Any sickness that is serious is believed to be brought about by ghosts or spirits; common complaints such as fever and ague are taken as coming in the course of nature. To say that savages are never ill without supposing a super-natural cause is not true of Melanesians; they make up their minds as the sickness comes whether it is natural or not, and the more important the individual who is sick, the more likely his sickness is to be ascribed to the anger of a ghost whom he has offended, or to witchcraft. No great man would like to be told that he was ill by natural weakness or decay. The sickness is almost always believed to be caused by a ghost, not by a spirit. It happens, indeed, as in the New Hebrides, where spirits are the chief objects of religious regard, that a man knows that he has trespassed on a sacred place belonging to some spirit, or has an ill-wisher who has a spirit for a helper, and supposes therefore when he is ill that a spirit has brought his sickness on him. But generally it is to the ghosts of the dead that sickness is ascribed in the eastern islands as well as in the western; recourse is had to them for aid in causing and removing sickness; and ghosts are believed to inflict sickness not only because some offence, such as a trespass, has been committed against them, or because one familiar with them has sought their aid with sacrifice and spells, but because there is a certain malignity in the feeling of all ghosts towards the living, who offend them by being alive. All human powers which are not merely bodily are believed to be enhanced by death; the ghost therefore of an ill-conditioned powerful man is naturally thought ready to use his increased powers of mischief.

Thus in Florida it is a tindalo, that is, a ghost of power, that causes illness; it is a matter of conjecture which of the