degradation. So when a king who had been great and
powerful in life saw his end approaching, he would send to the priests
the most costly presents, such as four or five of the largest and
fattest hogs, as many of the best canoes, and any rare and valuable
European article which he happened to possess. In return the priests
prayed for him daily at the temples till he died; and afterwards his
dead body was brought to one of these sacred edifices and kept upright
there for several days and nights, during which yet larger gifts were
sent by his relatives, and the most expensive sacrifices offered to the
idols. The decaying corpse was then removed, placed on a canoe, and
rowed out on the lagoon as far as an opening in the reef, only to be
brought back again in like manner; while all the time the priests
recited their prayers and performed their lugubrious ceremonies
over it on the water as well as on the land. Finally, the mouldering
remains were laid out to rot on a platform in one of the usual
charnel-houses.[233]

[233] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 331 _sq._

Conversion into a hat-stand was not, perhaps, the worst that could
happen to the soul of a Society Islander after death. In the island of
Raiatea there is a lake surrounded by trees, the tops of which appear
curiously flat. On this verdant platform the spirits of the newly
departed were said to dance and feast together until, at a subsequent
stage of their existence, they were converted into cockroaches.[234] The
souls of infants killed at birth were supposed to return in the bodies
of grasshoppers.[235]

[234] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 522.

[235] J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 455.

But the Society Islanders were far from thinking that the souls of the
dead herded together indiscriminately in the other world. They imagined
that the spirits were discriminated and assigned to abodes of different
degrees of happiness or misery, not according to their virtues or vices
in this life, but according to the rank which they had occupied in
society, one receptacle of superior attractions being occupied by the
souls of chiefs and other principal people, while another of an inferior
sort sufficed to lodge the souls of the lower orders. For they did not
suppose that their good or bad actions in this life affected in the
least their lot in the life hereafter, or that the deities took account
of any such distinction. Thus their religion