H— ANTHROPOLOGY 165 



A very close parallel is also to be found in the Fijian practice of burying 

 a whale's tooth with the dead man, who must throw it against a pandanus 

 tree in this or in the next world.*^ If he hit the pandanus tree with the 

 tooth he obtains, according to Deane, ' a passport on his journey to the 

 happy land.' According to Williams he knows that his widows have been 

 strangled to accompany him. The Ao warrior is given no whale's tooth 

 to throw, but is provided with a spear with which, having crossed the 

 river of the dead, he must aim at a tree which he will find on the far side, 

 calling out his own name as he does so.*^ If he has lived an honest life 

 he will hit the tree and obtain Paradise, if he has been a thief he will 

 miss it and be side-tracked. It is worth noting that Waterhouse con- 

 siders that the whale tooth is an innovation *^ as it has ' probably not 

 been in use much more than a century.' (He was writing in 1866.) He 

 adds that costly clubs and ' staves ' were similarly used as offerings like 

 the whale's tooth, and in the Naga hills among the Ao, as among other 

 tribes, the ordinary ceremonial gift is a decorated spear shaft without 

 a head. It is probably significant that whereas the Fijian belief related 

 to actual trees growing on specified islands, the Ao belief relates to a tree 

 growing in the Land of the Dead and encountered immediately after 

 crossing the stream which separates the land of the living from that of 

 the dead. 



One small point is perhaps worth mention. The demon on the road 

 to the dead insists, according to the Angami Naga, on the dead man's 

 eating either a bitter seed or a louse from his, the demon's, head before 

 he passes him.** Apparently in Thomas Williams' time it was customary 

 in Fiji to eat lice from one's head,*^ though this is not the case, at any 

 rate in my experience among Naga tribes. Williams records that the dead 

 in Fiji were dressed in new clothes.^" In the Naga hills to dream of a man 

 dressed in new clothes is a certain presage of death, and I once had this 

 brought home to me by one of my interpreters coming to me in camp 

 in considerable consternation to say that my orderly, who had been left 

 behind in Kohima was dead. He knew it because he had so dreamt of 

 him that night, and the news of his entirely unexpected death reached us 

 by runner two days later. ^^ 



As in Fiji ^^ so in the Assam hills ^' corpses must be fanned to keep 

 the flies from settling, and as in Fiji ^* so, if only occasionally, in Assam ^^ 

 the coffin takes the shape of a canoe or appears to do so, although in 

 the Assam hills a boat is rarely if ever used. In both places it is generally 

 believed that life in the next world continues as in this.^® That if a 

 man has been poor here he will be poor there and vice versa. In Bulotu, 



*° Seemann, 229, 399 ; Deane, 84 ; Williams, I, 8 n.^, 317 sq., 335 ; II, 242 ; 

 Frazer, I, 464. 



" Mills, II, 229. ■»' Waterhouse, II, 341. ' " Hutton, I, 226. 



" Williams, I, 185; II, 161. 



'" WiUiams, I, 313 n. ; Waterhouse, II, 319. 



*» Hutton, I, 247. " Williams, I, 316 ; II, 197. 



" Mills, II, 278 ; Parry, 400. " Williams, II, 192. 



" Hutton, I. 417 ; IX, 41 ; Mills, I, 157, 158 w. 



" WiUiams, I, 167 n. ", sq. ; II, 183, 243 ; Hutton, II, 212 ; Mills, II, 231 ; 

 Parry, 396. 



