called padiruma tondi, that is, “means to make the soul (tondi) stay at home.” In Java also rice is placed on the head of persons who have escaped a great danger or have returned home unexpectedly after it had been supposed that they were lost.[1] In Celebes they think that a bridegroom’s soul is apt to fly away at marriage, so coloured rice is scattered over him to induce it to stay. And, in general, at festivals in South Celebes rice is strewed on the head of the person in whose honour the festival is held, with the object of detaining his soul, which at such times is in especial danger of being lured away by envious demons.[2]
The soul of a sleeper is supposed to wander away from his body and actually to visit the very places of which he dreams. But this absence of the soul has its dangers, for if from any cause it should be permanently detained away from the body, the person, deprived of his soul, must die.[3] Many causes may detain the sleeper’s soul. Thus, his soul may meet the soul of another sleeper and the two souls may fight; if a Guinea negro wakens with sore bones in the morning, he thinks that his soul has been thrashed by another soul in sleep.[4] Or it may meet the soul of a person just deceased and be carried off by it; hence in the Aru Islands the inmates of a house will not sleep the night after a death has taken place in it, because the soul of the deceased is supposed to be still in the house
- ↑ Wilken, l.c.
- ↑ B. F. Matthes, Bijdragen tot de Ethnologie van Zuid-Celebes, p. 33; id., Over de Bissoes of heidensche priesters en priesteressen der Boeginezen, p. 9 sq.; id., Makassaarsch-Hollandsch Woordenboek, svv. Ko͡erroe and soemā̂ñgá, pp. 41, 569. Of these two words, the former means the sound made in calling fowls, and the latter means the soul. The expression for the ceremonies described in the text is ápako͡erróe soemā̂ñgá.
- ↑ Shway Yoe, The Burman, his Life and Notions, ii. 100.
- ↑ J. L. Wilson, West Afrika, p. 162 sq. (German translation).
