Although the Suque is highly developed here, there are other secret societies whose importance, however, is decreasing, as they are being more or less absorbed by the Suque. As each of these clubs has its own house, we sometimes find quite a number of such huts in one village, where they take the place of gamals. Each Suque high caste has his own house, which the low castes may not enter. The caste of the proprietor may be seen by the material of which the hedge is made, the lower castes having hedges of wood and logs, the highest, walls of stone and coral slabs. Inside the courtyard, each man lives alone, served only by his wives, who are allowed to cook his food. The separation of the sexes is not so severe on Ambrym as on Santo. On the whole, it would seem that in the past Ambrym had a position apart, and that only lately several forms of cult have been imported from Malekula and mingled with genuinely local rites. Even to-day, it is not rare for a man from Ambrym to settle for a while on Malekula, so as to be initiated into some rites which he then imports to Ambrym; and the Ambrymese pay poets large fees to teach them poems which are to be sung at certain feasts, accompanied by dances. Unhappily, I never had occasion to attend one of these "sing-songs."
The originality of Ambrym has been preserved in its sculpture only. The material used is tree-fern wood, which is used nowhere else but in the Banks Islands. The type of human being represented differs from that on the other islands, especially as regards the more moon-shaped form of the head. Representations of the whole body are frequent, so are female statues; these I have only found again in Gaua, where they are probably modern inventions. Sometimes a fish or a bird is carved on the statue, probably as a survival of old totemistic ideas, and meant to represent the totem animal of the ancestor or of his clan. The meaning of these carvings is quite obscure to the natives, and they answer questions in a very vague way, so that it is probable that totemistic ideas are dying out in the New Hebrides.
Most of the statues are meant to represent an ancestor. If a native is in trouble, he blows his whistle at nightfall near the statue, and if he hears a noise, he thinks the spirit of the ancestor has approached and entered the statue, and he proceeds to tell the statue his sorrows and ask the spirit for help. Occasionally sacrifices are made to the figures, as is shown by the pigs' jaws frequently found tied to them.