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Updated: June 14, 2025
But the lesson of Melanesia teaches us how very little we really know of the religion of low races, how complex it is, how hardly it can be forced into our theories, if we take it as given in our knowledge, allow for our ignorance, and are not content to select facts which suit our hypothesis, while ignoring the rest. On a higher level of material culture than the Melanesians are the Fijians.
"It is the same in the South Seas among the natives Samoans, Tongans, Fijians, and others. You can as you know, Mr. Roscoe," her voice had a subterranean meaning, "travel from end to end of those places, and, until the white man corrupts them, never meet with a case of stealing; you will find them moral too in other ways until the white man corrupts them.
Par J. Ferrari. We ask leave to add two suggestions in favor of the Fijians, both, it would seem, of philosophic importance.
Thomson writes: 'It is clear that the Fijians humanised their gods, because they had once existed on earth in human form.... Like other primitive people, the Fijians deified their ancestors. Yet the Fijians 'may have forgotten the names of their ancestors three generations back'! How in the world can you deify a person whom you don't remember?
When the Fijians had buried a man alive, as they often did, they used at nightfall to make a great uproar by means of bamboos, trumpet-shells, and so forth, for the purpose of frightening away his ghost, lest he should attempt to return to his old home. And to render his house unattractive to him they dismantled it and clothed it with everything that to their ideas seemed most repulsive.
The Fijians, as we learned from Williams, have ancestral gods, and also a singular form of the creative being, Ndengei, or, as Mr. Basil Thomson calls him, Degei. Mr.
His father was evidently a "much married man" since Ratu Lala himself told me that he had had "exactly three hundred wives." But in spite of this he had been a man of prowess, as the Fijians count it, and I received as a present from Ratu Lala a very heavy hardwood war-club that had once belonged to his father, and which, he assured me, had killed a great many people.
The Fijians worshipped a god who devoured the souls of the dead, inflicting torture in the eating, but mercifully releasing souls from pain when the meal was ended. The ancient Mexicans went to war "because their gods demanded something to eat." Their armies fought "only endeavoring to take prisoners, that they might have men to feed those gods." He was a "jealous" God, a "man of war."
These stories were reasonably entertaining, but they seemed to me futile, not to the point. There were little morals tagged to them, but these lacked relationship to the lives of little slum-boys. Be good and you will be happy, love the Lord and all will be well with you; which was about as true and as practical as the procedure of the Fijians, blowing horns to drive away a pestilence.
A man's logical and analytical adjustments are of little consequence, compared to his primary relations with Nature and truth: and people have sense enough to find it out in the long ran; they know what "logic" is worth. In that miserable delusion referred to above, the reverend Aztecs and Fijians argued rightly enough from their premises, no doubt, for many men can do this.
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