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Updated: May 7, 2025
The snares were made of stout cinet, about fifteen to thirty feet long, with loops on either side of different sizes, to suit the different sizes of souls; for fat souls there were large loops, for thin souls there were small ones. When a man was sick against whom the sorcerers had a grudge, they set up these soul-snares near his house and watched for the flight of his soul.
He is not taken to their temple for that purpose, but his head is bound round with sacred cinet brought from the temple, and he is then laid alive on a number of spears and borne on men's shoulders along the ranks, the priest of the god of war walking alongside and watching the writhings of the dying man. If a tear falls from his eye it is said he is weeping for his land.
These are lashed to both canoes with the strongest cinet, made of cocoa-nut fibre, so as to make the two almost as much one as same of the double ferry-boats that ply between Brooklyn and New York.
Ellis says, of the Tahitians, 'the body of the dead man was ... placed in a sitting posture, with the knees elevated, the face pressed down between the knees,... and the whole body tied with cord or cinet, wound repeatedly round. The binding may originally have been meant to keep the corpse, or ghost, from 'walking. I do not know that Tahitian prophets were ever tied up, to await inspiration.
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