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

(continued)
Indifference of the Fijians to death, p. 419; their custom of killing the
sick and aged with the consent of the victims, 419-424; their readiness
to die partly an effect of their belief in immortality, 422 sq.; wives
strangled or buried alive to accompany their husbands to the spirit land,
424-426; servants and dependants killed to attend their dead lords, 426;
sacrifices of foreskins and fingers in honour of dead chiefs, 426 sq.;
boys circumcised in order to save the lives of their fathers or fathers'
brothers, 427; 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