Paliau Maloat, a man of Baluan in the Admiralties, is the pivotal figure of continuing Manus religious history. Returning to the islands after the upheavals of the Second World War, he preached a comprehensive reform that fused Christian teaching with indigenous ideas and reorganised village society; a more ecstatic millenarian current, remembered as 'the Noise', ran alongside it. His movement condemned the propitiation of the household ghosts, and under it the ancestral skulls were cast aside and the seances abandoned, so that within a generation the religion Fortune had documented was largely dismantled. In popular memory Paliau himself acquired a mythologised, quasi-messianic aura, and later observers noted expectations of his return. Sources differ on how far his own teaching encouraged the cult that grew around him.