The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume 1 (of 3) / The Belief Among the Aborigines of Australia, the Torres Straits Islands, New Guinea and Melanesia

The author compiles ethnographic material and lecture-based analysis on how indigenous peoples of Australia, the Torres Strait, New Guinea and Melanesia understand life, death, and the dead. Using myths, funeral rites, sorcery accounts, and origin stories, he documents beliefs that range from denial of natural death to ghosts, reincarnation in descendants, ancestral cults, and protective or punitive funerary practices. Adopting a historical-comparative descriptive method, the work traces recurring motifs, explains variations in ritual and myth, and considers the social and psychological consequences of these attitudes toward death and the afterlife.