and doga pendants, are exhibited sacrificially to the spirits on a platform, an arrangement and custom called yolova (compare Chapter II, Division VII). Thus the vaygu’a represent the most effective offering to be given to the spirits, through which they can be put into a pleasant state of mind; “to make their minds good,” as the stereotyped phrase of the natives runs. In the yolova an offering is made to the spirits of what is most valued by the living. The shadowy visitors are supposed to take the spirit or shadow part of the vaygu’a home, and make a tanarere of it on the beach of Tuma, just as a Kula party make a tanarere of the acquired valuables on their home beach (cf. Chapter XV, Division IV). In all this there is a clear expression of the mental attitude of the natives, who regard the vaygu’a as supremely good in themselves, and not as convertible wealth, or as potential ornaments, or even as instruments of power. To possess vaygu’a is exhilarating, comforting, soothing in itself. They will look at vaygu’a and handle it for hours; even a touch of it imparts under circumstances its virtue.
This is most clearly expressed by a custom observed at death. A dying man is surrounded and overlaid with valuables which all his relatives and relatives-in-law bring in loan for the occasion, to take it back when all is over while the man’s own vaygu’a are left on the corpse for some time after death (see Plate LXV).
Various rationalised versions and justifications of this custom are given. Thus it is said to be a gift to Topileta, the keeper of the nether world; or, again, that it has to be taken in its spiritual form to procure a high social standing in Tuma, or simply, that it is laid to adorn and make happier the last moments of the dying.
All these beliefs no doubt exist side by side, and they are all compatible with, and indeed express, the underlying emotional attitude; the comforting action of the valuables.
It is applied to the dying as something full of good, as something exercising a pleasant action, soothing and fortifying at the same time.
They put it on his forehead, they put it on his chest, they rub his belly and his ribs with it, they dangle some of the vaygu’a before his nose.
I have often seen them do that, in fact, observed them do it for hours, and I believe there is a complex, emotional and intellectual attitude at the bottom of it; the desire to inspire with life; and at the same time to prepare for death; to hold him fast to this one, and to equip for the other world; but above all, the deep feeling that the vaygu’a are the supreme comfort, that to surround a man with them, even in his most evil moment, makes this moment less evil.
The same mental attitude is probably at the bottom of the custom which prescribes that the widow’s brothers should give a vaygu’a to the brothers of the dead man, the same vaygu’a being given back on the same day.
But it is kept just long enough to be of comfort to those, who, according to native kinship ideas, are most directly hit by the death.