Page:The Melanesians Studies in their Anthropology and Folklore.djvu/241

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Possession by Ghosts.
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doctors were called in; they found out whose ghost it was by calling on the names of dead men likely to have been offended, they washed him with water made powerful with charms, and they burned the vessel in which the magic water had been under his nose; he got well. In a similar case they will put bits of the fringe of a mat, which has belonged to the deceased, into a cocoa-nut shell, and burn it under the nose of the possessed. There was another man who threw off his malo and went naked at a feast, a sure sign of being out of his mind; he drew his bow at people, and carried things off. The people pitied him, and tried to cure him. When a man in such condition in that island spoke, it was not with his own voice, but with that of the dead man who possessed him; and such a man would know where things were hidden; when he was seen coming men would hide a bow or a club to try him, and he would always know where to find it. Thus the possession which causes madness cannot be quite distinguished from that which prophesies, and a man may pretend to be mad that he may get the reputation of being a prophet. At Saa a man will speak with the voice of a powerful man deceased, with contortions of the body which come upon him when he is possessed; he calls himself, and is spoken to by others, by the name of the dead man who speaks through him; he will eat fire, lift enormous weights, and foretell things to come. In the Banks' Islands the people make a distinction between possession by a ghost that enters a man for some particular purpose, and that by a ghost which comes for no other apparent cause than that being without a home in the abode of the dead he wanders mischievously about, a tamat lelera, a wandering ghost. Wonderful feats of strength and agility used to be performed under the influence of one of these 'wandering ghosts'; a man would move with supernatural quickness from place to place, he would be heard shouting at one moment in a lofty tree on one side of a village, and in another moment in a tree on the opposite side, he would utter sounds such as no sane man could make, his strength was such that many men could hardly master him. Such a man was