Sir Ghost

Sir Ghost is the central figure of Manus religion and, in Fortune's account, very nearly its whole pantheon: the Manus recognised no creator and told no cosmogonic myth, resting their religious life instead upon the moral guardianship of the household dead. Each dwelling keeps the skull of its most recently deceased senior man, and it is this man, addressed and cajoled as Sir Ghost, who watches over the conduct of his kin. He secures good fishing, prosperous trade and the health of children for those who meet their obligations, and sends illness, drowning and death upon those who lie, default on debts or transgress sexually. His will is read in divinatory seances. His tenure is provisional: when a member of the household dies despite him, the guardian is judged to have failed, his skull is reviled and flung into the lagoon, and the office passes to the next man to die.

Domains

• morality and justice
• household and lineage
• death and the dead

Powers

• oversees and enforces the moral and economic conduct of his household
• visits sickness, drowning and misfortune upon transgressors
• grants prosperity in fishing, trade and childbirth to the dutiful
• speaks to the living through a possessed medium in seance

Epithets

• Sir Ghost — the household's guardian ghostR. F. Fortune, Manus Religion (1935) (secondary)

Relations

• enemy: Cast-out GhostA guardian who fails to prevent a death in his house is disgraced, his skull thrown into the sea, and he becomes a vengeful ghost who afterwards preys on the living.R. F. Fortune, Manus Religion (1935) (secondary)
• enemy: Paliau MaloatThe reform movement led by Paliau condemned and abolished the skull cult, ordering the ancestral skulls discarded.Margaret Mead, New Lives for Old (1956); Theodore Schwartz, The Paliau Movement in the Admiralty Islands (1962) (secondary)

Sources

• Among the Manus true of the Admiralty Islands the recently dead senior man of a household becomes its guardian ghost, whose skull is preserved and who polices the morality of the living, rewarding duty with prosperity and punishing sin with sickness and death.: R. F. Fortune, Manus Religion (Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society 3, 1935) (primary); Margaret Mead, Growing Up in New Guinea (1930) (secondary)