of their polluted hands, should cause their death; so they were
fed by others.[211] This state of uncleanness lasted for a month, during
which the tabooed persons were forbidden to handle food as well as to
put it into their own mouths.[212]

[211] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 403.

[212] J. Wilson, _op. cit._ p. 363.

Again, when the ceremony of depositing the sins of the deceased in a
hole[213] was over, all who had touched the body or the garments of the
deceased, which were buried or destroyed, fled precipitately into the
sea to cleanse themselves from the pollution which they had incurred by
contact with the corpse; and they cast into the sea the garments they
had worn while they were engaged in the work. Having bathed, they
gathered a few pieces of coral from the bottom of the sea, and returning
with them to the house, addressed the dead body, saying, "With you may
the pollution be." With these words they threw down the pieces of coral
on the top of the hole that had been dug to receive all the objects
defiled by their connexion with the deceased.[214]

[213] See above, p. 305.

[214] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 403.

When a person had died of an infectious disorder, the priests entreated
him to bury the disease with him in the grave and not to inflict it upon
other people, when he revisited them as a ghost. They also threw a
plantain into the grave, and either buried with him or burned all his
utensils, that nobody might be infected by them.[215]

[215] J. Wilson, _op. cit._ p. 364.

Sec. 9. _The Fate of the Soul after Death_

The natives of the Society Islands believed in the immortality of the
human soul, or at all events in its separate existence after death[216];
they thought that no person perishes or becomes extinct.[217] On its
departure from the body the spirit, now called a _tee_, _teehee_, or
_tii_, was supposed to linger near its old habitation, whether the
mouldering remains exposed on the bier, or the bones buried in the
earth, or the skull kept in its box. In this state the spirits were
believed to lodge in small wooden images, seldom more than eighteen
inches high, which were placed round about the burial-ground.[218] These
images are variously said to have borne the same name (_tee_, _teehee_)
as the spirits which inhabited them,[219] or to have been called by a
different name (_unus_)[220]. Specimens of these images were seen by
George Forster in Tahiti. He says that round