At a Mission at Mona Mona in North Queensland were many native converts, but on the outskirts of the Mission was a group of non-converts including one Nebo, a famous witch doctor. In one case there was a startling recovery. Lambert of the Western Pacific Health Service of the Rockefeller Foundation wrote to me that on several occasions he had seen evidence of death from fear. “I have seen a strong young man die,” he declares, “the same day he was tapued the victims die under it as though their strength ran out as water.”ĭr. According to Tregear the tapu (taboo) among the Maoris of New Zealand is an awful weapon. This incident occurred in the afternoon the next day about 12 o’clock she was dead. In Brown’s New Zealand and Its Aborigines there is an account of a Maori woman who, having eaten some fruit, was told that it had been taken from a tabooed place she exclaimed that the sanctity of the chief had been profaned and that his spirit would kill her. And by intimidation or by terrifying augury or prediction he may cause death from fear.Īlso in New Zealand there are tales of death induced by ghostly power. Thus the chief or medicine man gains the reputation of exercising supernatural power. Apparently Soares de Sousa was first to observe instances of death among the Tupinambás Indians, death induced by fright when men were condemned and sentenced by a so-called “medicine man.”.
I propose to recite instances of this mode of death, to inquire whether reports of the phenomenon are trustworthy, and to examine a possible explanation of it if it should prove to be real.įirst, with regard to South America. The phenomenon is so extraordinary and so foreign to the experience of civilized people that it seems incredible certainly if it is authentic it deserves careful consideration. Among the natives of South America and Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and the islands of the Pacific, as well as among the negroes of nearby Haiti, “voodoo” death has been reported by apparently competent observers. In records of anthropologists and others who have lived with primitive people in widely scattered parts of the world is the testimony that when subjected to spells or sorcery or the use of “black magic” men may be brought to death.
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