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Updated: May 12, 2025
They have, however, a strange concept of the purification of the breath-body, or shade of the dead, by fire, which, although I have always regarded it as due to the teaching of Christian missionaries, may be aboriginal in character. This account of the judgment of the dead is as follows: There are two roads from the grave to the Below.
Another breath-body comes to the fork in the road, and the chief says, "You are bad," and he conducts it along the crooked path to the place of the first fire pit, where sits a second chief, Tokonaka, who throws the bad breath-body into the fire, and after a time it emerges purified, for it was not wholly bad.
Then the breath-body passes along the straight way to the far west, to the early Sipapû, the Underworld from which it came, the home of Müiyinwû.
One of these is a straight way connected with the path of the sun into the Underworld. At the fork of the road sits Tokonaka, and when the breath-body comes to this place this chief looks it over and, if satisfied, he says "Üm-pac lo-la-mai, ta ai," "You are very good; go on."
If, on coming out of the second fire pit, the breath-body is still considered bad by the chief, he takes it to the third fire, and, if there be no evil in it when it emerges from this pit, it is metamorphosed into an ant, but if unpurified by these three fires that is, if the chief still finds evil left in the breath-body he takes it to a fourth fire and again casts it into the flames, where it is utterly consumed, the only residue being soot on the side of the pit.
The chief says, "You are good now," and carries it back to the first chief, who accepts the breath-body and sends it along the straight road to the west. If, on emerging from the first fire, the soul is still unpurified, or not sufficiently so to be accepted, it is taken to the second fire pit and cast into it.
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