ABSTRACT

Incantations coupled with magical charms played a very large part in the lives of the people. The incantation consists of a form of words called säru’e, the power of which lies in the formal invocation of ghosts which concludes it. When it was desired to work harm to a person, an incantation was said over some object belonging to him, and this might afterwards be put into the altar of a ghost. The things used for magical charms to work harm with were skins of areca nuts which a person had eaten, cuttings of hair or of nails, excrement, spittle, earth on which he had trodden, the strip of coconut leaf with which he had rubbed himself down after bathing, fragments of his food, the afterbirth of children. In most cases the object was breathed upon in order to impart virtue to it. Certain things were considered as possessing in themselves the power to do harm, and an incantation was said over such charms. Lime, ginger, and dracaena leaves were the most commonly used of these. A further account of them, along with the incantations used in Spoiling, will be found under ‘ Black Magic ’ (Chap. XIII).