The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume 2 (of 3): The Belief Among the Polynesians

In Short

Sir James George Frazer’s The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume 2 is a monumental anthropological examination of religious life across Polynesia. Traversing New Zealand, Tonga, Samoa, the Hervey Archipelago, the Society Islands, the Marquesas, and Hawaii, Frazer synthesizes centuries of European accounts to chart how island societies understood the soul and its survival after death. Rather than presenting static doctrine, the book traces how invisible fears of ghosts and ancestral spirits dictated concrete social structures, from property protection and trade guilds to human sacrifices and megalithic architecture. Frazer demonstrates that these complex systems were not designed by calculating legislators, but grew organically from superstitious terror. The work endures as a masterclass in early comparative religion, capturing a vast, interconnected oceanic worldview through meticulous evidence, vivid historical reporting, and clear, sweeping Victorian prose.

The Story

Frazer begins his survey among the Maoris of New Zealand, establishing the foundation of Polynesian spiritual life. Here, the soul is not a simple unit but a volatile force, vulnerable to magic and capable of wandering during sleep or illness. When a person dies, their spirit transforms into a malicious, jealous power that turns against its own living relatives. To manage this threat, Maori society developed a pervasive system of taboo. While taboo served practical ends—protecting private property by rendering a logged tree or a sealed hut inviolable—Frazer insists it arose from raw fear. Malignant wizards could curse footprints or invoke ancestral spirits over pits, compelling the living to live under strict, protective ritual boundaries.

Moving east to the Tongan archipelago, the narrative shifts from individual soul-fear to organized civic religion. Tongans recognized ancient, uncreated gods (atua) alongside a growing pantheon of deified human ancestors. To appease these spirits and cure sick rulers, the living resorted to drastic sacrifices. Inferior relatives cut off their finger-joints daily, and during critical illnesses of paramount chiefs, young children were seized and strangled as vicarious offerings. Frazer details how Tongan burial grounds (fytocas) featured stepped, terraced stone pyramids built of giant megalithic blocks. He compares these structures to the marais of Tahiti, examining whether temples evolved directly from the tombs of deified kings, and argues that Tongan masons possessed the native skill to erect these massive monuments without needing to invoke mysterious lost civilizations.

In Samoa, the landscape itself reflects the spiritual tension of the culture: dense, flowerless forests on Upolu contrast with the bleak, volcanic wastes of Savaii. Samoan religion presents an intricate division of labor, where every trade guild—house-builders, canoe-makers, tattooers—operates under a patron god and enforces strict union rules. If a house-builder is underpaid, he abandons the job, and no other craftsman dares finish it under penalty of physical violence. Samoan spiritual life revolves around animal embodiments of divinity. If a family’s god—a cuttlefish, an eel, or a turtle—is accidentally eaten, the offender must lie in a cold, leaf-covered oven in a mock burnt-offering to avert divine wrath, lest the god grow inside their belly and kill them. Alongside these local animal guardians, Samoans acknowledged high creator gods like Tangaloa, who fished islands from the sea or sent bird messengers to turn maggots into men.

The journey continues through the Hervey and Society Islands, where mourning rites become elaborate theatrical performances. In the Hervey Group, funerals feature "crashing dirges" with mock battles and torchlit "death-talk" concerts lasting for months. In Tahiti, the installation of a king requires girding him with a feather belt consecrated by human blood. When war or desecration defiles the land, priests drag coconut-leaf nets through the surf to bring up clean coral, magically purifying the soil so crops can be safely eaten. To protect survivors from the dead, "corpse-praying priests" bury the deceased's guilt in a hole beside the bier and bind plantain leaves under the corpse's arms, commanding the spirit to remain content in the underworld and stop haunting its family.

In the Marquesas and Hawaii, the survey reaches its climax in scale and severity. Marquesan life balances joyful entertainments like stilt-fighting with intense death rituals, where mummified bodies are kept in houses or hidden in sea caves to protect skulls from enemy trophy-hunters. In Hawaii, taboo reached its most extreme expression: commoners could not touch the king, and a single breach brought death. Yet upon a chief's death, all social order collapsed into total license, accompanied by mass human sacrifices. The narrative concludes with the sudden abolition of the Hawaiian taboo system in 1819 by King Liholiho, just months before Christian missionaries arrived, bringing a dramatic end to centuries of ancestral ritual.

How It Unfolds

The Maori soul and taboo The study opens in New Zealand, examining how Maoris viewed the soul as a fragile entity easily injured by bad magic or wandering footprints. Spirits of the dead turn hostile, forcing the living to establish rigid taboos that govern daily life, protect private property, and prevent accidental encounters with supernatural forces.

Tongan sacrifices and megaliths Transitioning to Tonga, the focus shifts to the deification of dead nobles and the desperate rites performed to save dying rulers. Tongans amputate their own fingers or strangle children to appease the gods, burying their sacred chiefs in vast, stepped stone pyramids that rival traditional temples.

Samoan guilds and animal gods In Samoa, religious beliefs structure daily labor, creating powerful trade unions for builders and craftsmen. Worshippers navigate a landscape of animal deities, performing elaborate mock-sacrifices in cold ovens to avoid divine retribution if a sacred animal is eaten.

Tahitian purifications and corpse prayers The investigation turns to Tahiti, detailing royal inaugurations sealed with blood and grand ceremonies to cleanse land polluted by war. Specialized priests perform rituals at the burial bier, symbolically burying the dead man's sins and commanding his ghost not to harm his surviving family.

Marquesan mummies and Hawaiian collapse The final sections explore Marquesan mummies hidden in cliffside caves and the absolute power of Hawaiian taboos. The book concludes with the violent grief rites following a Hawaiian chief's death and the sudden, total abolition of the national taboo system under King Liholiho in 1819.

The People

Frazer’s inquiry relies on key historical observers, native figures, and divine personages who illustrate how Polynesian religious ideas operated in practice.

• William Mariner, an English sailor captured in Tonga in 1806, serves as Frazer’s primary witness for Tongan life. Living as a favorite of two successive Tongan kings named Finow, Mariner learned the language, observed sacred rites firsthand, and provided an unbiased, detailed account of Tongan religion, sacrifices, and megalithic tombs upon his return to England.
• Finow, the King of Tonga during Mariner's captivity, represents the absolute devotion of Polynesian rulers to divine appeasement. When Finow fell gravely ill, his family seized one of his young children from its mother's lap and strangled it with bark-cloth, offering the child's life as a vicarious sacrifice to avert the anger of the gods.
• Tooitonga, the divine hereditary chief of Tonga, stood at the apex of spiritual authority, regarded as a direct descendant of the gods. Upon his death, he was interred in massive, stepped pyramid tombs built of gigantic stone blocks, exemplifying how dead human leaders were elevated into gods.
• Tangaloa, the supreme deity across Samoa and wider Polynesia, embodies the high creator god. Dwelling in the sky, he formed the lower world, fished islands out of the deep sea, and dispatched his bird daughter to turn creeping vines and worms into the first human beings.
• Liholiho, the King of Hawaii who succeeded his father Kamehameha I in 1819, transformed his nation's spiritual history. Finding the traditional taboo system unbearable—which even forbade him from feeding himself with his own hands—he abolished the national religion and destroyed its sanctuaries at a single stroke, sweeping away centuries of ancestral worship.

In Its Own Voice

Frazer contrasts popular theories of societal design with the psychological realities of early religion:

"It was in its origin, I believe, simply a crude and barbarous form of superstition, which, like many other superstitions, has accidentally led to good results that were never contemplated by its ignorant and foolish votaries."

He captures the haunting dread that drove survivors to separate themselves from their deceased kin:

"Even the nearest and dearest relations were believed to have their natures radically changed by death and to hate those whom they had loved in life."

Describing the solemn Tahitian mass for the dead, Frazer highlights the priest's final instruction to the corpse:

"There are your family, there is your child, there is your wife, there is your father, and there is your mother. Be satisfied yonder. Look not towards those who are left in this world."

What It's Really About

Beneath its exhaustive regional catalogue, the book argues that human religion evolved out of emotional necessity and raw terror rather than abstract philosophical design. Frazer challenges the optimistic Victorian belief that social institutions were invented by wise, farsighted legislators. Institutions like taboo and private property did not spring from civic planning; they were the accidental, beneficial side-effects of dark superstitions rooted in the fear of ghosts.

Frazer explores the fluid boundary between human beings and the divine. Across Polynesia, dead chiefs do not merely pass into an afterlife; they transform into gods (atua) who actively monitor, threaten, and govern the living. By tracing how graves became temples, how human bodies were mummified or sacrificed, and how kings were clothed in sacred feathers, Frazer demonstrates that ancestral ghost-worship is the foundation of oceanic political and social power. The book asks fundamental questions about human nature: why do societies endure horrific practices like child sacrifice or total social collapse during mourning, and how does the terror of the dead ultimately forge the laws of the living?

Why Read It Today

The Belief in Immortality, Volume 2 remains a compelling read for anyone fascinated by the history of anthropology, comparative mythology, or the Pacific islands. Frazer writes with an unhurried, majestic cadence that makes dense ethnographic research read like an epic narrative. Readers who enjoy sweeping comparative studies or primary historical accounts will revel in his vivid descriptions—from the silent, overcast forests of Samoa and torchlit Hervey Island death-talks to the massive stone pyramids of Tonga.

Modern readers must navigate obvious period difficulties. Writing in 1922, Frazer employs imperial-era terminology, occasionally dismissing complex native beliefs as "crude," "barbarous," or "foolish." He relies on European observers—missionaries, whaling surgeons, navy captains, and captured sailors—whose perspectives carry their own cultural biases. Furthermore, the book is intentionally exhaustive; it spends pages detailing minor regional variations in burial customs, offering a dense, slow-paced read rather than a quick overview.

Yet despite these period attitudes, Frazer’s respect for his sources and his sheer intellectual ambition shine through. He does not reduce these cultures to static curiosities; he presents them as dynamic, complex societies wrestling with the universal human problem of mortality. What stays with the reader is the profound realization of how deeply the fear of death shapes human culture—building monuments, establishing property laws, driving trade unions, and dictating the boundaries of daily life.

<ElicitationsGroup message="Where would you like to go next with Frazer's work?"> <Elicitation label="Compare Polynesian and Melanesian burial customs" query="Compare the Polynesian burial customs and beliefs in immortality from this book with the Melanesian practices Frazer discussed in Volume 1."/> <Elicitation label="Explore the origin of taboo as a social institution" query="Detail Frazer's complete argument on how the institution of taboo evolved from superstition to protect private property and social order."/> <Elicitation label="Examine William Mariner's historical account of Tonga" query="Provide a deeper look at William Mariner's captivity in Tonga and how his observations shaped 19th-century European anthropology."/> </ElicitationsGroup>