gious
observances; for it is required of them, that they should partly
uncover themselves as they pass the _morais_, or take a considerable
circuit to avoid them. Though they have no notion that their god must
always be conferring benefits, without sometimes forgetting them, or
suffering evil to befall them, they seem to regard this less than the
attempts of some more inauspicious being to hurt them. They tell us,
that _Etee_ is an evil spirit, who sometimes does them mischief;
and to whom, as well as to their god, they make offerings. But the
mischiefs they apprehend from any superior invisible beings, are
confined to things merely temporal.

They believe the soul to be both immaterial and immortal. They say
that it keeps fluttering about the lips during the pangs of death; and
that then it ascends and mixes with, or, as they express it, is eaten
by the deity. In this state it remains for some time; after which it
departs to a certain place, destined for the reception of the souls
of men where it exists in eternal night; or, as they sometimes say, in
twilight or dawn. They have no idea of any permanent punishment after
death, for crimes that they have committed on earth; for the souls
of good and of bad men are eat indiscriminately by God. But they
certainly consider this coalition with the deity as a kind of
purification necessary to be undergone before they enter a state of
bliss. For, according to their doctrine, if a man refrain from all
connexion with women some months before death, he passes immediately
into his eternal mansion, without such a previous union; as if
already, by this abstinence, he were pure enough to be exempted from
the general lot.

They are, however, far from entertaining those sublime conceptions
of happiness, which our religion, and indeed reason, gives us room
to expect hereafter. The only great privilege they seem to think
they shall acquire by death is immortality; for they speak of spirits
being, in some measure, not totally divested of those passions which
actuated them when combined with material vehicles. Thus, if souls,
who were formerly enemies, should meet, they have many conflicts;
though, it should seem, to no purpose, as they are accounted
invulnerable in this invisible state. There is a similar reasoning
with regard to the meeting of man and wife. If the husband dies first,
the soul of the wife is known to him on its arrival in the land of
spirits. They resume their former ac