who in his lifetime had _mana_ [supernatural or magical
power] in him; the souls of common men are the common herd of ghosts,
nobodies alike before and after death. The supernatural power abiding in
the powerful living man abides in his ghost after death, with increased
vigour and more ease of movement. After his death, therefore, it is
expected that he should begin to work, and some one will come forward
and claim particular acquaintance with the ghost; if his power should
shew itself, his position is assured as one worthy to be invoked, and to
receive offerings, till his cultus gives way before the rising
importance of one newly dead, and the sacred place where his shrine once
stood and his relics were preserved is the only memorial of him that
remains; if no proof of his activity appears, he sinks into oblivion at
once."[584]

[Sidenote: Worship paid chiefly to the recent and well-remembered dead.]

From this instructive account we learn that worship is paid chiefly to
the recent and well-remembered dead, to the men whom the worshippers
knew personally and feared or respected in their lifetime. On the other
hand, when men have been long dead, and all who knew them have also been
gathered to their fathers, their memory fades away and with it their
worship gradually falls into complete desuetude. Thus the spirits who
receive the homage of these savages were real men of flesh and blood,
not mythical beings conjured up by the fancy of their worshippers, which
some legerdemain of the mind has foisted into the shrine and encircled
with the halo of divinity. Not that the Melanesians do not also worship
beings who, so far as we can see, are purely mythical, though their
worshippers firmly believe in their reality. But "they themselves make a
clear distinction between the existing, conscious, powerful disembodied
spirits of the dead, and other spiritual beings that never have been men
at all. It is true that the two orders of beings get confused in native
language and thought, but their confusion begins at one end and the
confusion of their visitors at another; they think so much and
constantly of ghosts that they speak of beings who were never men as
ghosts; Europeans take the spirits of the lately dead for gods; less
educated Europeans call them roundly devils."[585]

[Sidenote: Way in which a dead warrior came to be worshipped as a
martial ghost.]

As an example of the way in which the ghost of a real man who has just