who were clubbed, and there is another for those
who were done to death by witchcraft. The ghosts of those who were shot
keep rattling the reeds of the arrows which dealt them their fatal
wounds. Ghosts in the nether world have no knowledge of things out of
their sight and hearing; yet the living call upon them in time of need
and trouble, as if they could hear and help. Life, too, in the kingdom
of shadows is not eternal. The ghosts die the second death. Yet some say
that there are two such kingdoms, each called Panoi, the one over the
other; and that when the dead die the second death in the upper realm
they rise again from the dead in the nether realm, where they never die
but only turn into white ants' nests.[572]

[Sidenote: Distinction between the fate of the good and the fate of the
bad in the other world.]

It is interesting and not unimportant to observe that some of these
islanders make a distinction between the fate of good people and the
fate of bad people after death. The natives of Motlav, one of the Banks'
Islands, think that Panoi is a good place and that only the souls of the
good can enter it. According to them the souls of murderers, sorcerers,
thieves, liars, and adulterers are not suffered to enter the happy land.
The ghost of a murderer, for example, is met at the entrance by the
ghost of his victim, who withstands him and turns him back. All the bad
ghosts go away to a bad place, where they live, not indeed in physical
pain, but in misery: they quarrel, they are restless, homeless,
pitiable, malignant: they wander back to earth: they eat the foulest
food, their breath is noisome: they harm the living out of spite, they
eat men's souls, they haunt graves and woods. But in the true Panoi the
souls of the good live in peace and harmony.[573] Thus these people
believe that the state of the soul after death depends on the kind of
life a man led on earth; if he was good, he will be happy; if he was
bad, he will be miserable. If this creed is of purely native origin, and
Dr. Codrington seems to entertain no doubt that it is so, it marks a
considerable ethical advance among those who accept it.

[Sidenote: Descent of the living to the world of the dead.]

The Eastern Melanesians think that living people can go down to the land
of the dead and return alive to the upper world. Sometimes they do this
in the body, but at other times only in the spirit, when they are asleep
or in a faint; for at such times