n, to the number of three or four at
a time."[89] Such a sacrifice is more likely to have been religious than
magical; we may suppose that the victims were rather offered to the gods
as substitutes for the chief than killed to recruit his failing strength
by an infusion of their health and vigour. A chief would probably have
disdained the idea of drawing fresh energy from the bodies of women,
though he might be ready enough to believe that the gods would consent
to accept their life as a proxy for his own. It is true that elsewhere,
notably in Uganda, human beings have been killed to prolong the life of
the king by directly transferring their strength to him;[90] but in such
cases it would seem that the victims have invariably been men and not
women.

[87] Captain James Wilson, _op. cit._ p. 240.

[88] Captain James Wilson, _Missionary Voyage to the Southern
Pacific Ocean_, p. 257.

[89] Captain James Wilson, _op. cit._, p. 278. This Ambler was a
man of very indifferent, not to say infamous, character, but he
rendered the missionaries considerable service by instructing
them in the Tongan language, which he spoke fluently. See
Captain James Wilson, _op. cit._ pp. 98, 244 _sq._

[90] See _Adonis, Attis, Osiris_, Third Edition, ii. 219 _sqq._

Sec. 8. _The Doctrine of the Soul and its Destiny after Death_

Thus far we have dealt with the primary or superior gods, who were
believed to have been always gods, and about whose origin nothing was
known. We now pass to a consideration of the secondary or inferior gods,
whose origin was perfectly well known, since they were all of them the
souls of dead chiefs or nobles, of whom some had died or been killed in
recent years. But before we take up the subject of their worship, it
will be well to say a few words on the Tongan doctrine of the human
soul, since these secondary deities were avowedly neither more nor less
than human souls raised to a higher power by death.

The Tongans, in their native state, before the advent of Europeans, did
not conceive of the soul as a purely immaterial essence, that being a
conception too refined for the thought of a savage. They imagined it to
be the finer or more aeriform part of the body which leaves it suddenly
at the moment of death, and which may be thought to stand in the same
relation to the body as the perfume of a flower to its solid substance.
They had no proper word to express this fine ethe