Abstract
II. A BELIEF in sorcery is very general, especially amongst the Melanesians, and some of the practices associated with it often resemble those prevalent amongst the Australians and African Negroes, and even in mediæval times in Europe. In Tanna, New Hebrides group, Dr. G. Turner tells us that the real gods “may be said to be the disease-makers. It is surprising how these men are dreaded, and how firm the belief is that they have in their hands the power of life and death. There are rainmakers and thunder-makers, and fly- and mosquito-makers, and a host of other ‘sacred men’; but the disease-makers are the most dreaded. It is believed that these men can create disease and death by burning what is called nahak. Nahak means rubbish, but principally refuse of food. Everything of the kind they burn or throw into the sea lest the disease-makers should get hold of it. These fellows are always about, and consider it their special business to pick up and burn, with certain formalities, anything in the nahak line that comes in their way. If a disease-maker sees the skin of a banana, for instance, he picks it up, wraps it in a leaf, and wears it all day hanging round his neck. The people stare as they see him go along, and say to each other, ‘He has got something; he will do for somebody by and by at night.’ In the evening he scrapes the bark off a tree, mixes it with the banana skin, rolls up tightly in a leaf in the form of a cigar, and then puts the one end close enough to the fire to cause it to singe, and smoulder and burn away gradually. Presently he hears a shell blowing. ‘There,’ he says to his friends, ‘there is the man whose rubbish I am now burning; he is ill. Let us stop burning and see what they bring in the morning.’
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References
"On the Relations (of the Indo-Chinese and Inter-Oceanic Races and Languages." (Trübner, 1880.)
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KEANE, A. The Indo-Chinese and Oceanic Races—Types and Affinities 1 . Nature 23, 220–224 (1881). https://doi.org/10.1038/023220a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/023220a0