ere not permanently confined to the lower
world. They could return to the land of the living by night to hold
converse with members of their families, to warn and instruct them in
dreams, and to foretell the future. They could cause disease and death
by entering into the bodies of their enemies and even of their friends,
and they produced nightmare by sitting on the chests of sleepers. They
haunted some houses and especially burying-grounds. Their apparitions
were visible to the living and were greatly dreaded; people tried to
drive them away by shouts, noises, and the firing of guns. But the
ghosts had to return to the nether world at daybreak. It was because
they feared the spirits of the dead that the Samoans took such great
pains to propitiate dying people with presents; this they did above all
to persons whom they had injured, because they had most reason to dread
the anger of their ghosts.[175] However, the souls of the departed were
also thought of in a more amiable light; they could help as well as harm
mankind. Hence prayers were commonly offered at the grave of a parent, a
brother, or a chief. The suppliant, for example, might pray for health
in sickness; or, if he were of a malignant turn, he might implore the
ghost to compass the death of some person at whom he bore a grudge. Thus
we are told that a woman prayed for the death of her brother, and he
died accordingly.[176] In such beliefs and practices we have, as I have
already observed, the essential elements of a regular worship of the
dead. Whether the Samoans were on the way to evolve such a religion or,
as Dr. George Brown preferred to suppose,[177] had left it behind them
and made some progress towards a higher faith, we hardly possess the
means of determining.

[175] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 259; S. Ella, _op. cit._
p. 644; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp.
219, 221, 222.

[176] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 151.

[177] G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 245,
282.

But while the Samoans thought that the dead return to earth to make or
mar the living, they did not believe that the spirits come back to be
born again in the form of men or animals or to occupy inanimate bodies;
in other words they had no belief in the transmigration of souls.[178]
The absence of such a belief is significant in view of Dr. Rivers's
suggestion that Melanesian totemism may have been evolved out of a
doctrine of metempsychosis, human so