24 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



ing mats. The place of death was earnestly sought out ; the 

 mat was spread upon the ground, and the women sat about 

 and watched it. If any living thing alighted it was twice 

 brushed away ; upon the third coming it was known to be the 

 spirit of the dead, was folded in, carried home and buried 

 beside the body, and the ghost rested. But for this the spirit 

 would wander about and be unable to gain an entrance to the 

 proper country of the dead. Australian natives resort to 

 many ingenious practices to prevent the ghost from leaving 

 the grave after burial. They sometimes remove the finger- 

 nails of the deceased so that the spirit may be unable to 

 scrape a hole in the earth and thus escape ; or, to gain the 

 same end, they tie the fingers tightly together with cords, or 

 the finger-tips are burned. In Thibet they pierce the soles 

 of the feet and also the heart of the deceased, thinking that, 

 being nailed into their tomb, the spirit cannot possibly leave 

 it. Hunt, writing of the Moriori, says, " The everlasting 

 kikokiko was a terrible bugbear to old and young ; they had a 

 firm belief that a person visited by an ancestral ghost, and 

 touched on the head, would die very soon after such visitation. 

 To prevent the dead from troubling them they had a very 

 curious custom." When a person died they would all as- 

 semble at midnight in some solitary, secluded spot and pro- 

 ceed to " lay " the ghost. " First, kindling a large fire, they 

 would sit round in a circle, each person holding a long rod in 

 his hand ; to the end of each rod a tuft of spear-grass was 

 tied ; they would then sway their bodies to and fro, waving 

 the rods over the fire in every direction, jabbering away 

 strange and unintelligible incantations." 



The methods adopted by the Maoris to "lay" the ghosts 

 of the dead varied in different tribes, according to the local 

 theories regarding the soul's destiny after death. Maori 

 philosophers were divided in their beliefs as to the destiny of 

 the soul after death. Some held that the soul remains on 

 earth ; others that it descended to Hades (Te Po) ; while a 

 third school believed that the human spirit finally ascended to 

 the blissful heavens of Rangi. :;: Thus many of the Taranaki 

 natives had no faith either in the ascending or descending of 

 spirits : they thought that the dead always remained near 

 their bodies; that the wahi tapu, which are generally small 

 groves adjoining their pas, in which they were interred, were 

 also filled with their spirits; but if a person died a violent 

 death, he wandered about until the priest, by his incantations, 

 brought his spirit within the sacred enclosure. An old 

 philosopher of the Tuhoe tribes, one of the Hades school of 

 thought, thus addressed Mr. Elsdon Best: "Son, our ances- 



* This is modern. — E. B. 



