The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I | Page 8

saturnalia attending such rites of circumcision, 427 sq.; the Nanga, or sacred enclosure of stones, dedicated to the worship of ancestors, 428 sq.; first-fruits of the yams offered to the ancestors in the Nanga, 429; initiation of young men in the Nanga, drama of death and resurrection, sacrament of food and water, 429-432; the initiation followed by a period of sexual licence, 433; the initiatory rites apparently intended to introduce the novices to the ancestral spirits and endow them with the powers of the dead, 434 sq.; the rites seem to have been imported into Fiji by immigrants from the west, 435 sq.; the licence attending these rites perhaps a reversion to primitive communism for the purpose of propitiating the ancestral spirits, 436 sq.; description of the Nanga or sacred enclosure of stones, 437 sq.; comparison with the cromlechs and other megalithic monuments of Europe, 438.
Lecture XX.--The Belief in Immortality among the Natives of Eastern Melanesia (Fiji) (concluded)
Worship of parents and other dead relations in Fiji, pp. 439 sq.; Fijian notion of divinity (kalou), 440; two classes of gods, namely, divine gods and human gods or deified men, 440 sq.; temples (bures) 441 sq.; worship at the temples, 443; priests (betes), their oracular inspiration by the gods, 443-446; human sacrifices on various occasions, such as building a house or launching a new canoe, 446 sq.; high estimation in which manslaughter was held by the Fijians, 447 sq.; consecration of manslayers and restrictions laid on them, probably from fear of the ghosts of their victims, 448 sq.; certain funeral customs based apparently on the fear of ghosts, 450 sqq.; persons who have handled a corpse forbidden to touch food with their hands, 450 sq.; seclusion of gravediggers, 451; mutilations, brandings, and fasts in honour of the dead, 451 sq.; the dead carried out of the house by a special opening to prevent the return of the ghost, 452-461; the other world and the way thither, 462 sqq.; the ghostly ferry, 462 sq.; the ghost and the pandanus tree, 463 sq.; hard fate of the unmarried dead, 464; the Killer of Souls, 464 sq.; ghosts precipitated into a lake, 465 sq.; Murimuria, an inferior sort of heaven, 466; the Fijian Elysium, 466 sq.; transmigration and annihilation, the few that are saved, 467.
Concluding observations, 467-471; strength and universality of the belief in immortality among savages, 468; the state of war among savage and civilised peoples often a direct consequence of the belief in immortality, 468 sq.; economic loss involved in sacrifices to the dead, 469; how does the savage belief in immortality bear on the truth or falsehood of that belief in general? 469; the answer depends to some extent on the view we take of human nature, 469-471; the conclusion left open, 471.
Note.--Myth of the Continuance of Death
Index

LECTURE I
INTRODUCTION
[Sidenote: Natural theology, and the three modes of handling it, the dogmatic, the philosophical, and the historical.]
The subject of these lectures is a branch of natural theology. By natural theology I understand that reasoned knowledge of a God or gods which man may be supposed, whether rightly or wrongly, capable of attaining to by the exercise of his natural faculties alone. Thus defined, the subject may be treated in at least three different ways, namely, dogmatically, philosophically, and historically. We may simply state the dogmas of natural theology which appear to us to be true: that is the dogmatic method. Or, secondly, we may examine the validity of the grounds on which these dogmas have been or may be maintained: that is the philosophic method. Or, thirdly, we may content ourselves with describing the various views which have been held on the subject and tracing their origin and evolution in history: that is the historical method. The first of these three methods assumes the truth of natural theology, the second discusses it, and the third neither assumes nor discusses but simply ignores it: the historian as such is not concerned with the truth or falsehood of the beliefs he describes, his business is merely to record them and to track them as far as possible to their sources. Now that the subject of natural theology is ripe for a purely dogmatic treatment will hardly, I think, be maintained by any one, to whatever school of thought he may belong; accordingly that method of treatment need not occupy us further. Far otherwise is it with the philosophic method which undertakes to enquire into the truth or falsehood of the belief in a God: no method could be more appropriate at a time like the present, when the opinions of educated and thoughtful men on that profound topic are so unsettled, diverse, and conflicting. A philosophical treatment of the subject might comprise a discussion of such questions as whether a natural knowledge of God is possible