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beliefs, whether savage or not. When a Karaveni enters the 

 body of a person, this latter becomes O'o. Such a person, 

 without any provocation, without being angry or sorry, simply 

 because the Karaveni was inside him or her, might be guilty 

 of any conceivable mischief. Such people in olden days would 

 kill a man, woman, or child; they would destroy property, 

 burn a house (which would mean the whole village as well), 

 chop up a canoe, throw spears at a house, etc. Sometimes they 

 would come running along to the gardens, frighten people they 

 met on the way, return in their frenzied state to the village, 

 and fall down exhausted. Next day they would be quite well 

 again, as if nothing had happened. Thus I was informed by 

 the natives about the O'o. As is usually the case, in the 

 perspective of native narrative and information, things assume 

 larger dimensions just as they are removed in time. When 

 I asked about concrete examples of O'o, several cases were 

 mentioned, amongst which one was fairly recent. A Laruoro 

 woman, named Vaila, used to have O'o fits regularly. At 

 such times she dressed up fantastically, decorating her head 

 and body with leaves and weeds, and seizing a spear or a drum, 

 she performed a dance of her own, of which the natives were 

 very much afraid, but she did not commit any of the crimes 

 attributed to the O'o of ''olden days." It is, however, quite 

 possible that the O'o were not always so harmless. There 

 occur instances of murder done simply to give vent to a man's 

 disturbed state of mind, these being undoubtedly related to the 

 amok psychology. A case in point is the murder of his own 

 mother by Owdni, a native of Loupom, which occurred quite 

 recently (mentioned above, chap, iii., sec. 5). Though the 

 natives were doubtful whether this was a case of O'o — very 

 likely there was too much white man's fuss about the matter 

 to make it an O'o pure and simple — still, all agreed that an 

 O'o man would behave just like that, and the Karaveni and 

 O'o belief undoubtedly covers this region of native psychology. 



2. Magic. 

 Black Magic. — The only black magic I was able to trace 

 among the Mailu is the sorcery of the Bard'u described in the 

 foregoing section. There is, as far as I could detect, no minor 

 black magic. None is practised with the remains of food, hair 

 and nail clippings, or with objects long associated with the 

 human body. I saw people in Mailu carelessly throwing away 

 the shaved off, or pulled out, hair, and I was told that nobody 

 would be afraid of doing so, though on the mainland, especially 

 towards Gadaisiu, a Mailu man would take precautions, and 



