ges of men were, in some of them, placed one
upon the head of another." See J. Cook, _Voyages_, i. 150 _sq._
These "carved boards" were no doubt of the same sort as the
_tees_ or _teehees_ described by the two Forsters. No other
writer seems to mention the figures of birds carved on them.

[223] J. R. Forster, _op. cit._ p. 543.

However, the Society Islanders appear to have been by no means
consistent in the views which they held concerning the fate of the soul
after death. Like many other people, they seem to have wavered between a
belief that the souls of the dead lingered invisible near their old
homes and the belief that the disembodied spirits went away to a distant
land, where all human souls, which have departed this life, met and
dwelt together. Or perhaps it might be more correct to say, that instead
of wavering between these two inconsistent beliefs, they held them both
firmly without perceiving their inconsistency. At all events these
islanders believed that either at death or at some time after it their
souls departed to a distant place called _po_ or Night, the common abode
of gods and of departed spirits.[224] Thither the soul was conducted by
other spirits, and on its arrival it was eaten by the gods, not all at
once, but by degrees. They imagined that the souls of ancestors or
relatives, who ranked among the gods, scraped the different parts of the
newly arrived spirit with a kind of serrated shell at different times,
after which they ate and digested it. If the soul underwent this process
of being eaten and digested three separate times, it became a deified or
imperishable spirit and might visit the world and inspire living
folk.[225] According to one account, the soul was cooked whole in an
earth-oven, as pigs are baked on earth, and was then placed in a basket
of coco-nut leaves before being served up to the god whom the deceased
had worshipped in life. "By this cannibal divinity he was now eaten up;
after which, through some inexplicable process, the dead and devoured
man emanated from the body of the god, and became immortal."[226] In the
island of Raiatea the great god Oro was supposed to use a scallop-shell
"to scrape the flesh from the bones of newly deceased bodies, previous
to their being converted into pure spirits by being devoured by him, and
afterwards transformed by passing through the laboratory of his cannibal
stomach."[227] This process of being devoured by a god wa