Melanesians, were the natives of Tonga in the first decade of this century. The Tongan religious beliefs were nearly akin to the ideas of the Samoans and of the Solomon Islanders. In place of Vuis they spoke of Hotooas (Atuas), and like the Vuis, those spiritual beings have either been purely spiritual from the beginning, or have been incarnate in humanity, and are now ghosts, but ghosts enjoying many of the privileges of gods. All men, however, have not souls capable of a separate existence, only the Egi, or nobles, possess a spiritual part, which goes to Bolotoo, the land of gods and ghosts, after death, and enjoys "power similar to that of the original gods, but less." It is open to philosophers of Mr. Herber Spencer's school to argue that the "original gods" were once ghosts like the others, but this was not the opinion of the Tongans. Both sorts of gods appear occasionally to mankind—the primitive deities particularly affect the forms of "lizards, porpoises, and a species of water-snake, hence those animals are much respected."[1] Whether each stock of Tongans had its own animal incarnation of its special god, as in Samoa, does not appear from Mariner's narrative. The gods took human morality under their special protection, punishing the evil and rewarding the good, in this life only, not in the land of the dead. When the comfortable doctrine of eternal punishment was expounded to the Tongans by Mariner, the poor heathen merely remarked that it "was very bad indeed for the Papalangies" or foreigners. Their untutored
- ↑ Mariner's Tonga Islands, Edin., 1827, ii. 99–101.
