With these views, it is natural that they should desire to pass through this change before their mental and bodily powers are so enfeebled by age as to deprive them of their capacity for enjoyment. To this motive must be added the contempt which attaches to physical weakness among a nation of warriors, and the wrongs and insults which await those who are no longer able to protect themselves. When therefore a man finds his strength declining with the advance of age, and feels that he will soon be unequal to discharge the duties of this life, and to partake in the pleasures of that which is to come, he calls together his relations, and tells them that he is now worn out and useless, that he sees they are all ashamed of him, and that he has determined to be buried.” So on a day appointed they meet and bury him alive.[1] In Vaté (New Hebrides) the aged were buried alive at their own request. It was considered a disgrace to the family of an old chief if he was not buried alive.[2] Of the Kamants, a Jewish tribe in Abyssinia, it is reported that “they never let a person die a natural death, but if any of their relatives is nearly expiring, the priest of the village is called to cut his throat; if this be omitted, they believe that the departed soul has not entered the mansions of the blessed.”[3]
But it is with the death of the god-man—the divine king or priest—that we are here especially concerned. The people of Congo believed, as we have seen, that if their pontiff the Chitomé were to die a natural death,
- ↑ U.S. Exploring Expedition, Ethnology and Philology, by H. Hale (Philadelphia, 1846), p. 65. Cp. Th. Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, i. 183; J. E. Erskine, Journal of a Cruise among the Islands of the Western Pacific, p. 248.
- ↑ Turner, Samoa, p. 335.
- ↑ Martin Flad, A Short Description of the Falasha and Kamants in Abyssinia, p. 19.
