It Is No Protection To The Possessor, From Attack, Or Injury, On The Part Of Other Natives.

On the contrary, the greater the skill of the sorcerer, and the more extensive his reputation, the more likely is he to be charged with offences he is unconscious of, and made to pay their penalty.

Sorcerers are not ubiquitous, but have the power of becoming invisible, and can transport themselves instantaneously to any place they please. Women are never sorcerers. It is a general belief among almost all the Aborigines, that Europeans, or white people, are resuscitated natives, who have changed their colour, and who are supposed to return to the same localities they had inhabited as black people. The most puzzling point, however, with this theory, appears to be that they cannot make out how it is that the returned natives do not know their former friends or relatives. I have myself often been asked, with seriousness and earnestness, who, among the Europeans, were their fathers, their mothers, and their other relatives, and how it is that the dead were so ignorant, or so forgetful, as not to know their friends when they again returned to the earth.

One old native informed me, that all blacks, when dead, go up to the clouds, where they have plenty to eat and drink; fish, birds, and game of all kinds, with weapons and implements to take them. He then told me, that occasionally individuals had been up to the clouds, and had come back, but that such instances were very rare; his own mother, he said, had been one of the favoured few.

Enter page number Go  Previous Next
Page 780 of 914
Words from 217538 to 217807 of 254601