28 Hutton Webster 



camp or village, and even to other settlements in the vicinity. ^^ 

 The Koryak stopped all work in the settlement before the last 

 rites to the dead. No one went hunting or sealing, no one went 

 to fetch wood, even the women did no sewing. At the present 

 time this rule is so far abrogated as to apply only to those in the 

 house where the body lies.^^ Among the Yakuts when a man 

 dies the members of his household may not execute any work 

 until after the next full moon.^^ 



6. TABOOS OBSERVED DURING FEASTS OF THE DEAD AND AT 

 EXPULSION OF GHOSTS 



Feasts of the dead, the primitive All Souls' days, sometimes 

 furnish occasions for' abstinence from work. The same practice 

 is met at periods devoted to the banning of the ghosts of the 

 recently deceased, and of evil spirits generally, from the com- 

 munity.^* Here, as elsewhere, we may well raise the query 

 whether such proceedings have always existed with the particular 

 meaning now assigned to them or whether in many instances they 

 may not hark back to a " pre-animistic " period when the evil in- 

 fluences, instead of being personified under the form of spirits, 

 were more vaguely regarded as some mysterious and infectious 

 contamination. 



The descriptions of primitive rites by early observers, though 

 frequently the only accounts which we possess, are often obscure 

 and unsatisfactory. These remarks apply to an annual ceremony 

 which some Fijian tribes were wont to perform, possibly as an 

 expulsion of evil spirits or ghosts. " The time of its celebration 

 was determined by the appearance of a certain fish or sea-slug 

 which swarms out in dense shoals from the coral reefs on a 



^^ Bogoras, in Memoirs of tlie American Museum of Natural History, 

 xi. 521. 



^" Jochelson, ibid., x. 104 sq. 



^ Sumner, " The Yakuts," abridged from the Russian of Sieroshevski, 

 Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 1901, xxxi. 107. 



*'0n All Souls' days, see Frazer, Adonis, Attis, Osiris; 301-1S. On 

 the expulsion, of evils, idem, The Golden Bought London, 1900, iii. 39-93. 



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