FROM ‘THE OTHER SIDE OF PARADISE: THE SEXUAL LIFE AND CUSTOMS OF AN UNSPOILED PEOPLE’ BY L. TIBBUT (UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPT)
MAGIC PLAYS AN integral, indispensable part in the lives of the islanders. They believe, as we have seen, that it alone is responsible for birth. It determines the weather, the tides, the number of fish in the sea (and the amount of these that can be caught), how dark is the night, how bright the sun, sexual attraction, love and death. No-one dies on the island except by the ministry of magic.
It follows that they seek to control the magic they find all around them. There are two ways in which they do this. The first is by ritual, that is by a set of regulated actions the strict observance of which they believe will ward off ambient bad magic and in some cases, they hope, attract ambient good magic. There are rituals for all the staging posts of life: birth, coming of age, courtship, marriage, pregnancy and death, as well as very practical ones for planting vegetables, catching fish, etc. As with the rituals of our own Christian church those of the natives have mainly become a matter of rote. This is not to say they are not strictly observed, for they are, but rather that the practitioners have no knowledge of why these particular sets of actions are necessary. If you ask them what walking around a newly-wed couple’s home seven times clockwise then seven times anticlockwise chanting a prescribed formula of words is for, they will tell you it is to bring the marriage good magic. If you persist and say, Yes, but how will walking around the hut help and why seven times? they simply shrug and say it is what one does. When I suggested that if seven times brought good magic then eight times would bring even better, everyone laughed derisively as if what I’d said was a mixture of ignorance and stupidity. Perhaps it is! Anyway, enough of these rituals which are not the subject of the present discussion. They will be dealt with more fully in a later chapter.
The other method practised to combat or encourage ambient magic is sorcery which can be used to ensure a good fishing catch or to cure illness. More than that the aid of sorcery is enlisted on an individual basis for every activity of any importance in the islanders’ lives. If a boy wishes to make a certain girl love him, he will visit a sorcerer. If she rejects him he will not take the snub personally but will console himself with the knowledge that a rival has used a more potent spell. If a woman is barren, she consults a sorcerer. If you have a dispute with a neighbour you may ask a sorcerer to kill him. If he dies then the magic has worked. If he remains hale and hearty, he has had recourse to a practitioner of magic superior to yours. The islanders do not believe that death is something that simply happens from illness, accident or old age. It is thought always to have been brought about by the use of magic against the deceased.
The islanders have no chiefs. The people they listen to and take notice of are the sorcerers. Some of these have formidable reputations although it is hard to see why one should be esteemed above another, other than through a record of successes brought about by a series of serendipitous coincidences. Of course, there is the character of the sorcerer. The reason the man Purnu is held to be the most powerful sorcerer on the island may have much to do with his guile. He is a crafty man who can see, for example, when a boy takes a fancy to a girl and comes to him for a love potion, what the lovesick boy cannot, that the girl is already besotted with him, which is often the way with young people. He performs a spell and lo and behold the boy’s advances are accepted. On the other hand, if he knows from gossip (he is a great one for gossip!) that the girl’s affections lie elsewhere, he will tell the boy it is impossible she should love him because he has already performed a spell for his rival. He may even, for all I know, add something to his spiel about it being unethical for him to have two clients with conflicting interests.
Managua is respected as a less powerful but nevertheless extremely effective magician. I suspect this is because he always talks such good sense and that things others do not see are obvious to him; this gives him a high success rate in the matter of predictions. Moreover, since he is the only islander who can read, Managua has gained enormous additional kudos from his literacy. The islanders see being able to make a meaning, or indeed a story, from a jumble of apparently meaningless symbols on a piece of paper – or more especially on a Coca-Cola can – as demonstrative of the highest order of magical prowess. (Incidentally it is not true to say the natives are wholly illiterate. All of them, down to the younger children, can recognize the Coca-Cola logo, even when it is upon a printed page rather than a can.)
Many special powers are attributed to sorcerers, although the most superior of these belong only to the greatest proponents of the magical arts. They can see in the dark; they can walk through fire; they are prodigious lovemakers; they can fly.
Purnu once offered to take me on a flight around the island with him, an offer I declined, although I did ask him why, if he could fly, he didn’t go on a Coca-Cola run to the big island, which is 300 miles away.
‘Is be too far,’ he told me. ‘Is use up too much magic.’
When I asked Managua if he could fly he replied, ‘Is not be so easy any more with this damn leg.’
Ludicrous though the idea of men flying seems to Westerners, many of the islanders insist they have observed various sorcerers in flight.
Even magic has its price and sorcerers earn good yams for their spells. Purnu is one of the wealthiest men on the island thanks largely to his reputation and is treated like a good orthodontist; you go to him if you can afford it; if not, you settle for second best.