to the usual custom of young mothers of sleeping over a small fire, a sorceress lies with her baby in the cold. As the child grows up, the mother will take it into her arms and carry it through the air on her nightly rounds. Entering girlhood at the age when the first grass skirt is put on a maiden, the little prospective witch will begin to fly herself.
Another system of training, running side by side with flying, consists in accustoming the child to participation in human flesh. Even before the growing witch will begin to fly on her own account, the mother will take her to the ghoulish repasts, where she and other witches sit over a corpse, eating its eyes, tongue, lungs, and entrails. There the little girl receives her first share of corpse flesh, and trains her taste to like this diet.
There are other forms of training ascribed to mothers solicitous that their daughters should grow up into efficient yoyova and mulukwausi. At night the mother will stand on one side of the hut, with the child in her hands, and throw the little one over the roof. Then quickly, with the speed only possible to a yoyova, she will move round, and catch the child on the other side. This happens before the child begins to fly, and is meant to accustom it to passing rapidly through the air. Or again, the child will be held by her feet, head down, and remain in this position while the mother utters a spell. Thus gradually, by all these means, the child acquires the powers and tastes of a yoyova.
It is easy to pick out such girls from other children. They will be recognisable by their crude tastes, and more especially by their habit of eating raw flesh of pigs or uncooked fish. And here we come to a point, where mythical superstition plays over into something more real, for I have been assured by reliable informants, and those not only natives, that there are cases of girls who will show a craving for raw meat, and when a pig is being quartered in the village will drink its blood and tear up its flesh. These statements I never could verify by direct observations, and they may be only the result of very strong belief projecting its own realities, as we see on every side in our own society in miraculous cures, spiritistic phenomena, etc., etc. If, however, the eating of raw flesh by girl children really occurs, this simply means that they play up to what they know is said and believed about them. This again is a phenomenon of social psychology met with in many phases of Trobriand society and in our own.
This does not mean that the character of a yoyova is publicly donned. Indeed, though a man often owns up to the fact that he is a bwaga’u, and treats his speciality quite openly in conversation, a woman will never directly confess to being a yoyova, not even to her own husband. But she will certainly be marked by everyone as such a one, and she will often play up to the rôle, for it is always an advantage to be supposed to be endowed with supernatural powers. And moreover, being a sorceress is also a good source of income. A woman will often receive presents with the understanding that such and such a person has to be injured. She will openly take gifts, avowedly in payment for healing someone who has been hurt by another witch. Thus the character of a yoyova is, in a way, a public one, and the most important and powerful witches will be enumerated by name. But no woman will ever openly speak about being one. Of course to have such a character would in no way spoil matrimonial chances, or do anything but enhance the social status of a woman.