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Straightening the Path of Souls to the Spirit World

Arthur Grimble captained the cricket eleven for his Oxford college, and played Moliere’s Martine in a school play in impeccable French and with icy venom, wearing a white Pompadour wig. Grimble chose the remote Gilbert Islands – east of New Guinea, southwest of Hawaii – for the romance of distance and distant customs. “The islands I had chosen blindly, for the only reason that they were romantically remote, were peopled by a race who, despite the old savagery of their wars and the grimness of their endless battle with the sea, were princes in laughter and friendship, poetry and love.” [A Pattern of Islands]

In his 22 years with the Gilbert Islanders, this English patrician collected many accounts of soul travel. In his paper “From Death to Birth in the Gilbert Islands” he observes that certain crafty travelers are said to have outfoxed the grim gatekeeper of the spirit world by slipping around him in order to make a quick tour of the afterworld – and come back to their bodies. Nakaa waits at the southern gate of Bouru, the spirit world, weaving nets he uses to catch souls before they enter. He can instantly judge their merits, and will consign some to places of punishment such as a nightmare world, the Land of Unrestful Sleep. But

There are those who say that if a soul was adroit, it would pass craftily by Nakaa’s left hand, so avoiding his strand: then it might look upon the land of Bouru for a while and again return to its earthly body.

Like most indigenous peoples, the Gilbert Islanders are careful to separate different aspects of the energy of the departed at the point of death. On the three nights of the bo-maki night ceremony, they encourage the soul to leave on its afterlife journey by quite dramatic means, forming everyone into a line that marches through the village beating the air with sticks to drive the soul away from its former home.

But they also pen a second aspect of psychic energy with the physical remains, placing shriveled coconuts in the palms of the deceased as “soulcatchers” to prevent it from straying. They are quite comfortable about living with the bones of their dead and using them as talismans.

They have a specialist – known as the “head lifter” because she speaks with the head of the corpse in her lap – usually female, whose task it is to open the sight of the deceased so he will find his body abhorrent. She chants spells intended to make the soul see its former body in a ghastly phosphorescent glow of decay. Her task is also to “straighten the path of the soul to the spirit world”, providing directions for the afterlife journey.

There will be various tests and trials, including an encounter with a dreadful hag who will check whether the deceased has the requisite tribal tattoos. You don’t get to this afterlife unless you have been marked by the culture that invented it, just as many Catholics believe that you can’t get to heaven unless you have been baptized. The itinerary for the journey is a sequence in island-hopping, clearly drawn from the memories of migration and the world of water and wind familiar to a seafaring people.

References

 Arthur Grimble. A Pattern of Islands London: John Murray, 1952.

___________ “From Death to Birth in the Gilbert Islands” in Rosemary Grimble (ed. and illustr.) Migrations, Myth and Magic from the Gilbert Islands: Early Writings of Sir Arthur Grimble. London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972.