relatives and then goes eastwards to the large island of New Britain. We are not told of any properties of the long soul which agree with those of the more impersonal form of the soul-substance of the Kai.
In Kiriwina, one of the Trobriand Islands, at the south-eastern corner of New Guinea, the people distinguish two spiritual entities which leave the body at death. One called the baloma, which is identified with the image reflected from water, leaves the body at death and goes to Tuma, an island which according to the belief of some is connected with the netherworld. Dr. Malinowski,[1] to whom we owe this knowledge, was uncertain whether the baloma could be regarded as a soul dwelling in the body during life, or as a double which “detaches itself from the body at death.” It is of great interest that Dr. Malinowski should have been in such doubt concerning the state of the baloma during life, for if the baloma is a double which separates from the body at death, the concept would correspond almost exactly with that of Indonesia. The other spiritual entity, called the kosi, is identified with the shadow. It exists only for a short time after death, frequenting the usual haunts of the dead man, such as his garden or water-hole. According to the belief of some, only those who had been sorcerers during life had a kosi after death, and another belief, also limited to some persons, was that the kosi became a baloma after a time. Since the baloma clearly represents the ghost of Indonesia, the kosi must be the representative of the soul-substance if the two-fold nature of the Trobriand soul is related to the Indonesian belief.
The Mailu, who inhabit the coast of south-eastern New Guinea from Cape Rodney to the middle of Orangerie Bay, believe in three spiritual entities.[2] Of these the breath is considered to be the vital principle which ceases to exist at a man’s death; the second is that spiritual part of a man
