Machine translation of the 1948–1954 Italian original. The original text is authoritative.
They punish the sorcerers who have caused that loss. The village usually redeems itself from this plundering by offering a few pigs or some other notable gift. The tomb (each family has one) is sacred, kept scrupulously clean and adorned with fragrant plants, and is the most inviolable place. They observe mourning for about a year; all the villages do so at the death of a chief. This mourning consists in shaving the head and staining the whole body black with coconut charcoal. The woman in mourning dresses less elegantly, but in looser garments that reach down to her feet.
They celebrated the festival of the dead, “Jumalara,” which is the most religious festival. Afterward they plant the yams, which is preceded by five or six days of general fishing for all the villages of a bay. The food, duly cooked and prepared, is placed at the back of the hut behind a mat, and the dead are invited with tears and lamentations. Then each person withdraws, sits on his bench beside the door of the hut, and speaks of the glories of his ancestors, while the dead are thought to be eating. Then, tired of waiting, they beat around the hut, dismiss their invited dead, and congratulate themselves on their temperance (the elders must eat little). The family does not eat the feast of their own dead but offers it all to friends and relatives. Finally, in the evening, they make a great noise again to drive the souls of the dead (serii) back to their tombs. There is, therefore, the concept of the immortality of the soul. When someone dies, regardless of any consideration of morality, his soul sets out for Tum, an animal-like paradise, a place of delights, which is imagined to lie on an uninhabited islet to the west of Muju (Woodlark).
In matriarchal cultures animism is highly developed and magic is also present. Infanticide exists. The cult of the skull is practiced especially in secret societies. These use masks shaped like towers that rise above the head and cover the body, as in the Duk-Duk societies, or are plastic, and when magic intersects with totemism, they depict the respective animals. The masks are used by the men of the secret societies when they perform representations, the germ of future drama, often combined with declamations and dances. When magic intersects with totemism, bloody rites of fertilizing the earth come into use, which in later magic is linked to sexual fertilization.
V. ECONOMY AND ERGOLOGY
In magic the means of subsistence come from agriculture, first done with a digging stick, then with a hoe, and finally with a plow drawn by an animal, e.g., an ox (v. ECONOMIC SYSTEMS). Agriculture was not practiced in Australia. The hoe is of stone, fastened to a wooden handle with two bindings. White weapons and bludgeoning weapons are characteristic of magic, especially heavy clubs or maces. The flat shield is used, often attached to a handle. The musical instruments of magic are the Pan flute and the musical bow, then also the wooden drum. The boat is made of planks but without an outrigger, except in Australia where it is made of tree bark. They make baskets, wickerwork, and other objects used for fishing with plaited work. Pottery is painted with round forms, meanders, and concentric circles. The house is a wooden hut, square or rectangular, with a thatched roof. Villages arise within the same culture, governed by a democratic regime.
VI. ORIGIN
On the basis of the matriarchal cultural complex of the Lycians and the Iroquois, Fr. Lafitau concluded, as has been said, that they were genetically dependent on each other. This conclusion, notes Fr. Koppers, was fundamentally correct, but at that time it was premature to speak, as that missionary did, of a direct dependence between the two peoples. It is right to see a connection between the Lycians and the Iroquois, but it is not possible to conceive of it through a direct migration from the previous territories to North America. Since the Lycians and the Iroquois shared a matriarchal complex within a much broader sphere, it was justified to conclude in the sense of their genetic dependence, but it was absolutely arbitrary to think of direct relations between them. Since magic is connected with agriculture, the question of origins is likewise tied to II. According to one thesis, magic arose in the Near East, in Mesopotamia; according to another, it originated in Southeast Asia (v. ECONOMIC SYSTEMS). Ethnologists and many prehistorians generally hold that agriculture is a female invention, because the woman, gathering the spontaneous fruits of the earth daily, was naturally led to observe the life of plants and to conceive the idea of cultivating them. The cultivated field becomes property; the work of the field required her proximity and the stability of the dwelling; hence a change in economic, legal, and psychological relations between man and woman, between wife and husband (v. WOMAN. VII. Woman in ethnology; LAW. IX. Law among primitives).
VII. CONCLUSION
Laviosa Zambotti has noted the importance of agriculture in human history, saying that it was the last great cultural current to spread to the farthest corners of the earth and to remain confined there—thus, presumably, without fundamental alterations—until the worldwide diffusion, after the 15th century, of Western European civilization. If, however, one judges magic in its most ancient forms and from a moral standpoint, one must say that harmony between male and female relations and activities was lacking. Indeed, in magic, according to Fr. Schmidt, the father cannot be a father as he should be, nor is the mother a mother in the way and to the extent she could be, because she is too much a sister and daughter, too dependent on her elder brother and her mother. The offspring is too exclusively hers and is not the fruit
