Sickness and death
If anyone is ill it is supposed that some ancestral ghost is offended and has sent the sickness, or else that some human enemy has bewitched the patient. In either case the diviner has to consult the spirits to find out who is responsible and what is the remedy. Drought, floods, a plague of locusts, or any other natural calamity may be due to the anger of the spirits.
The dead are supposed to go on living for an indefinite time underground, very much as they have done on the upper earth. There are many stories describing the adventures of people who have accidentally reached this country usually through following a porcupine, or some other burrowing animal, into its hole. |
One does not hear very much of ghosts appearing to survivors "in their habit as they lived"; though it -is a common occurrence (as I suppose it is everywhere) for people to see and talk with their dead friends in dreams. But they often come back in other shapes-mostly as snakes, and very often as birds-sometimes in the form of that uncanny insect the mantis, which some people call "the spirits' fowl." Later on we shall find some very striking tales, in which the ghost of a murdered man or woman haunts the murderer in the shape of a bird and calls on the kinsmen to avenge the slain.
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