Sir Ghost

The Sir Ghost is the guardian ghost of a Manus household, ordinarily the spirit of the most recently dead adult male, whose skull was cleaned and kept in a carved wooden bowl inside the dwelling. He supervises the sexual, economic and social conduct of his living kin, rewarding propriety with health and success in fishing and trade and answering lapses with sickness or death. When misfortune persisted, the household concluded that the ghost had failed or turned against them; his relics were then thrown into the lagoon and the ghost of another dead kinsman installed in his place. His will was learned through mediums, characteristically women, who relayed his diagnoses and demands at divination. The Sir Ghost is a role occupied in turn by different named dead rather than a single eternal personage, and the household guardian is always addressed as a particular late father, brother or son.

Domains

• ancestral guardianship
• moral order
• death and the dead

Powers

• guard the household
• punish transgression with sickness
• speak through a medium

Epithets

• Sir Ghost — the household's own guarding deadR. F. Fortune, Manus Religion (1935) — Fortune's rendering of the family guardian ghost (primary)

Sources

• The central supernatural of Manus (Titan) religion was the Sir Ghost, the ghost of a recently dead adult male whose skull was kept in the house and who guarded and morally policed his living kin.: R. F. Fortune, Manus Religion (Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society 3, 1935) (primary); Margaret Mead, Growing Up in New Guinea (1930) (primary)