Curiosities of Superstition, and Sketches - W. H. Davenport Adams

Human sacrifices were also offered on the breaking out of war. Mr. Williams remarks that a correct idea ...

my body, but you cannot hurt my soul.” This address did not move the compassion of his murderers. Laying their ...

unfading, and of perpetual sweetness; its inmates enjoyed a beauty which never waned, and a youth which never ...

lonely in its passage to the invisible world, and that by such an offering its happiness might be at once ...

CHAPTER XIII. THE FIJI ISLANDERS. THE annexation of the Fiji Islands to the British empire lends to the practic ...

Strangers who desire to consult a god begin by cutting a pile of firewood for the table. Sometimes only ...

The Fijians conceive that the way to Buruto, or Heaven, is impeded by many difficulties, except for the great chi ...

themselves do not object to this summary anticipation of the moment of dissolution; on the contrary ...

impossible; I was unconscious that I breathed; and involuntarily, or rather against my will, I sank ...

day but the night also; the fire consumed the fuel gathered by her hands. If we awoke in the still night ...

darkest superstitions of the Fijians. We shall adapt from Lord George Campbell a more pleasing picture ...

Next came the war dances, which reproduced the incidents of the past, incidents never likely to be repeated ...

Out of darkness cometh light, and a future, irradiated by the light of Christianity, succeeds to the ghastly pa ...

...

CHAPTER XIV. THE RELIGION OF THE MAORIES. WE meet in New Zealand with that curious system of “taboo” or “t ...

fact that faith is not incompatible with ignorance. It is the very essence and secret of Superstition. ...

Those of the chiefs ascend in the first place to the upper heavens, where each chief leaves his left eye ...

almost boundless field is thus opened up to the practice of human unscrupulousness and the weakness o ...

pulls out two stalks of the Pteris esculenta, from which the fibres of the root must be removed, and beating ...

on pain of death, was permitted to trespass near the spot. The houses were all fastened up, and ...