THE NATURE OF THE SOUL
It has from time immemorial been a widely recognised belief among
mankind that the soul after death bears the likeness of its fleshly
body, although opinions have differed largely as to its precise nature.
But it would seem to be generally admitted that the soul set free from
its earthly tenement is at once recognised by anyone to whom it may
appear, reminding us of Lord Tennyson's dictum in 'In Memoriam':
Eternal form shall still divide
The eternal soul from all beside;
And I shall know him when we meet.
Despite the fact that the disembodied spirit has been supposed to
retain its familiar likeness, we find all kinds of strange ideas
existing in most parts of the world as to what sort of a thing it
really is when its condition of existence is so completely changed.
Thus, according to a conception which has received in most ages very
extensive credence, the soul has substantiality. This was the Greek
idea of ghosts, and 'it is only,' writes Bishop Thirwall, 'after their
strength has been repaired by the blood of a slaughtered victim, that
they recover reason and memory for a time, can recognise their living
friends, and feel anxiety for those they have left on earth.' A similar
notion of substantiality prevailed among the Hebrews, and, as Herbert
Spencer points out, 'the stories about ghosts accepted among ourselves
in past times involved the same thought. The ability to open doors,
to clank chains, and make other noises implies considerable coherence
of the ghost's substance.'[31] That this conception of the soul was
not only received but taught, may be gathered from Tertullian, who
says: 'The soul is material, composed of a substance different to the
body, and particular. It has all the qualities of matter, but it is
immortal. It has a figure like the body. It is born at the same time as
the flesh, and receives an individuality of character which it never
loses.' He further describes[32] a vision or revelation of a certain
Montanist prophetess, of the soul seen by her corporeally, thin and
lucid, aerial in colour, and human in form. It is recorded, too, as
an opinion of Epicurus, that 'they who say the soul is incorporeal
talk folly, for it could neither do nor suffer anything were it such.'
It was the idea of materiality that caused the superstitious folk in
years gone by to attribute to ghosts all kinds of weird and eccentric
acts which could not otherwise be explained. And yet it has always
been a puzzle in Animistic philosophy, how a ghost could be possessed
at one moment of a corporeal body, and immediately afterwards vanish
into immateriality, escaping sight and touch. But this strange ghost
phenomenon is clearly depicted in sacred history, where we find
substantiality, now insubstantiality, and now something between the
two, described. Thus, as Herbert Spencer remarks,[33] 'the resuscitated
Christ was described as having wounds that admitted of tactual
examination, and yet as passing unimpeded through a closed door or
through walls.' And, as he adds, the supernatural beings of the Hebrews
generally, 'whether revived dead or not, were similarly conceived:
here, angels dining with Abraham, or pulling Lot into the house,
apparently possess complete corporeity; there, both angels and demons
are spoken of as swarming invisibly in the surrounding air, thus being
incorporeal; while elsewhere they are said to have wings, implying
motion by mechanical action, and are represented as rubbing against,
and wearing out, the dresses of Rabbis in the Synagogue.' All kinds
of strange theories have been suggested by perplexed metaphysicians
to account for this duplex nature of the disembodied soul; Calmet
having maintained that 'immaterial souls have their own vaporous
bodies, or occasionally have such vaporous bodies provided for them by
supernatural means to enable them to appear as spectres, or that they
possess the power of condensing the circumambient air into phantom-like
bodies to invest themselves in.'[34]
In Fiji the soul is regarded quite as a material object, subject
to the same laws as the living body, and having to struggle hard to
gain the paradisaical Bolotu. Some idea, too, of the hardships it has
to undergo in its material state may be gathered from the following
passage in Dr. Letourneau's 'Sociology' (p. 251): 'After death the soul
of the Fijian goes first of all to the eastern extremity of _Vanna
Levou_, and during this voyage it is most important that it should hold
in its hand the soul of the tooth of a spermaceti whale, for this tooth
ought to grow into a tree, and the soul of the poor human creature
climbs up to the top of this tree. When it is perched up there it is
obliged to await the arrival of the souls of his wives, who have been
religiously strangled to serve as escort to their master. Unless all
these and many other precautions are taken, the soul of the deceased
Fijian remains mournfully seated upon the fatal bough until the arrival
of the good Ravuyalo, who kills him once and for all, and leaves him
without means of escape.'
According to another popular and widely accepted doctrine, the soul
was supposed to be composed of a peculiar subtle substance, a kind
of vaporous materiality. The Choctaws have their ghosts or wandering
spirits which can speak and are visible, but not tangible.[35] The
Tongans conceived it as the aeriform part of the body, related to it as
the perfume and essence of a flower; and the Greenlanders speak of it
as pale and soft, without flesh and bone, so that he who tries to grasp
it feels nothing he can take hold of. The Siamese describe the soul as
consisting of some strange matter, invisible and untouchable. While Dr.
Tylor quotes a curious passage from Hampole,[36] in which the soul,
owing to the thinness of its substance, suffers all the more intense
suffering in purgatory:
The soul is more tendre and nesche (soft)
Than the bodi that hath bones and fleysche;
Thanne the soul that is so tendere of kinde,
Mote nedis hure penaunce hardere y-finde,
Than eni bodi that evere on live was.
Then there is the idea of the soul as a shadow, a form of superstition
which has given rise to many quaint beliefs among uncultured tribes.
The Basutos, when walking by a river, take care not to let their
shadow fall on the water, lest a crocodile seize it, and draw the
owner in. The Zulu affirms that at death the shadow of a man in some
mysterious way leaves the body, and hence, it is said, a corpse cannot
cast a shadow. Certain African tribes consider that 'as he dies, man
leaves a shadow behind him, but only for a short time. The shade, or
the mind, of the deceased remains, they think, close to the grave where
the corpse has been buried. This shadow is generally evil-minded, and
they often fly away from it in changing their place of abode.'[37] The
Ojibways tell how one of their chiefs died,[38] but while they were
watching the body on the third night, his shadow came back into it. He
sat up, and told them how he had travelled to the River of Death, but
was stopped there, and sent back to his people.
Speaking of the human shadow in relation to foundation sacrifices, we
are reminded[39] how, according to many ancient Roumenian legends,
'every new church or otherwise important building became a human
grave, as it was thought indispensable to its stability to wall in a
living man or woman, whose spirit henceforward haunts the place. In
later times this custom underwent some modifications, and it became
usual, in place of a living man, to wall in his shadow. This is done
by measuring the shadow of a person with a long piece of cord, or a
ribbon made of strips of reed, and interring this measure instead of
the person himself, who, unconscious victim of the spell thrown upon
him, will pine away and die within forty days. It is an indispensable
condition to the success of this proceeding that the chosen victim be
ignorant of the part he is playing, therefore careless passers by near
a building may often hear the cry, warning, "Beware, lest they take
thy shadow!" So deeply engrained is this superstition, that not long
ago there were professional shadow-traders, who made it their business
to provide architects with the necessary victims for securing their
walls.' 'Of course, the man whose shadow is thus interred must die,'
argues the Roumenian, 'but as he is unaware of his doom, he does not
feel any pain or anxiety, and so it is less cruel than walling in a
living man.'
At the present day in Russia, as elsewhere, a shadow is a common
metaphor for the soul,[40] whence it arises that there are persons
there who object to having their silhouettes taken, fearing that if
they do, they will die before the year is out. In the same way, a man's
reflected image is supposed to be in communion with his inner self,
and, therefore, children are often forbidden to look at themselves in a
glass, lest their sleep should be disturbed at night. It may be added,
too, as Mr. Clodd points out, that in the barbaric belief of the loss
of the shadow being baleful, 'we have the germ of the mediæval legends
of shadowless men, and of tales of which Chamisso's "Story of Peter
Schlemihl" is a type.'[41] Hence the dead in purgatory recognised that
Dante was alive when they saw that, unlike theirs, his figure cast a
shadow on the ground. But, as Mr. Fiske observes,[42] 'the theory which
identifies the soul with the shadow, and supposes the shadow to depart
with the sickness and death of the body, would seem liable to be
attended with some difficulties in the way of verification, even to the
dim intelligence of the savage.'
Again, another doctrine promulgated under various forms in Animistic
philosophy is, that the existence and condition of the soul depend upon
the manner of death. The Australian, for instance, not content with
slaying his enemy, cuts off the right thumb of the corpse, so that the
departed soul may be incapacitated from throwing a spear; and even the
half-civilised Chinese prefer the punishment of crucifixion to that of
decapitation, that their souls may not wander headless about the spirit
world. Similarly the Indians of Brazil 'believe that the dead arrive
in the other world wounded or hacked to pieces, in fact, just as they
left this.' European folk-lore has preserved, more or less, the same
idea, and the ghost of the murdered person often appears displaying
the wounds which were the cause of the death of the body. Many a
weird and ghastly ghost tale still current in different parts of the
country gives the most blood-curdling details of such apparitions; and
although, in certain cases, a century or so is said to have elapsed
since they first made their appearance, they still bear the marks of
violence and cruelty which were done to them by a murderous hand when
in the flesh. An old story tells how, when the Earl of Cornwall met the
fetch of William Rufus carried on a very large black goat, all black
and naked, across the Bodmin moors, he saw that it was wounded through
the breast. Robert adjured the goat, in the name of the Holy Trinity,
to tell what it was he carried so strangely. He answered, 'I am
carrying your king to judgment; yea, that tyrant, William Rufus, for I
am an evil spirit, and the revenger of his malice which he bore to the
Church of God. It was I that did cause this slaughter.' Having spoken,
the spectre vanished. Soon afterwards Robert heard that at that very
hour the king had been slain in the New Forest by the arrow of William
Tirell.[43] This idea corresponds with what was believed in early
times, for Ovid[44] tells us how
Umbra cruenta Remi visa est assistere lecto.
Again, some modes of death are supposed to kill not only the body but
also the soul. 'Among all primitive peoples,' writes Mr. Dorman,[45]
'where a belief in the renewal of life, or the resurrection, exists,
the peace and happiness of the spirit, which remains in or about the
body, depend upon success in preventing the body, or any part of it,
from being devoured or destroyed in any manner.' The New Zealanders
believed that the man who was eaten was annihilated, both body and
soul; and one day a bushman, who was a magician, having put to death
a woman, dashed the head of the corpse to pieces with large stones,
buried her, and made a large fire over the grave, for fear, as he
explained, lest she should rise again and trouble him. The same idea,
remarks Sir John Lubbock,[46] evidently influenced the Californian, who
did not dispute the immortality of the whites, who buried their dead,
but could not believe the same of his own people, because they were in
the habit of burning them, maintaining that when they were burnt they
became annihilated.
It may be added, too, that the belief underlying the burial customs
of most American tribes was to preserve the bones of the dead, the
opinion being that the soul, or a part of it, dwelt in the bones.
These, indeed, were the seeds which, planted in the earth, or preserved
unbroken in safe places, would in time put on once again a garb of
flesh, and germinate into living human beings.[47] This Animistic
belief has been amply illustrated by mythology and superstition. In
an Aztec legend, after one of the destructions of the world, Zoloti
descended to the realm of the dead, and brought thence a bone of
the perished race. This, sprinkled with blood, grew on the fourth
day into a youth, the father of the present race. The practice of
pulverising the bones of the dead, practised by some tribes, and of
mixing them with the food, was defended by asserting that the souls
of the dead remained in the bones, and lived again in the living.[48]
The Peruvians were so careful lest any of the body should be lost,
that they preserved even the parings of the nails and clippings of
the hair--expecting the mummified body to be inhabited by its soul;
while the Choctaws maintain that the spirits of the dead will return
to the bones in the bone mounds, and flesh will knit together their
loose joints. Even the lower animals were supposed to follow the same
law. 'Hardly any of the American hunting-tribes,' writes Mr. Brinton,
'before their original manners were vitiated by foreign influence,
permitted the bones of game slain in the chase to be broken, or left
carelessly about the encampment; they were collected in heaps, or
thrown into the water.' The Yuricares of Bolivia carried this belief
to such an inconvenient extent that they carefully put by even small
fish bones, saying that unless this was done the fish and game would
disappear from the country. The traveller on the western prairies
often notices the buffalo skulls, countless numbers of which bleach on
those vast plains, arranged in circles and symmetrical piles by the
careful hands of the native hunters. The explanation for this practice
is that these osseous relics of the dead 'contain the spirits of the
slain animals, and that some time in the future they will rise from the
earth, re-clothe themselves with flesh, and stock the prairies anew.'
As a curious illustration of how every spiritual conception was
materialised in olden times, may be quoted the fanciful conception
of the weight of the soul. Thus in mediæval literature the angel in
the Last Judgment 'was constantly represented weighing the souls in
a literal balance, while devils clinging to the scales endeavoured
to disturb the equilibrium.'[49] But how seriously such tests of the
weight of the soul have been received, may be gathered from the cases
now and then forthcoming of this materialistic notion of its nature.
These, writes Dr. Tylor,[50] range from the 'conception of a Basuto
diviner that the late queen had been bestriding his shoulders, and
he never felt such a weight in his wife, to Glanvil's story of David
Hunter, the neatherd, who lifted up the old woman's ghost, and she felt
just like a bag of feathers in his arms; or the pathetic superstition
that the dead mother's coming back in the night to suckle the baby she
has left on earth, may be known by the hollow pressed down in the bed
where she lay, and at last down to the alleged modern spiritualistic
reckoning of the weight of a human soul at from three to four ounces.'
But the heavy tread which occasionally makes the stairs creak and
boards resound has been instanced as showing that, whatever may be
the real nature of the soul, it is capable of materialising itself at
certain times, and of displaying an amount of force and energy in no
way dissimilar to that which is possessed when living in the flesh.
Just, too, as souls are possessed of visible forms, so they are
generally supposed to have voices. According to Dr. Tylor,[51] 'men
who perceive evidently that souls do talk when they present themselves
in dream or vision, naturally take for granted at once the objective
reality of the ghostly voice, and of the ghostly form from which it
proceeds;' and this principle, he adds, 'is involved in the series of
narratives of spiritual communications with living men, from savagery
onward to civilisation.' European folk-lore represents ghostly voices
as resembling their material form during life, although less audible.
With savage races the spirit voice is described 'as a low murmur,
chirp, or whistle.' Thus, when the ghosts of the New Zealanders
address the living, they speak in whistling tones. The sorcerer among
the Zulus 'hears the spirits who speak by whistlings speaking to
him.' Whistling is the language of the Caledonians, and the Algonquin
Indians of North America 'could hear the shadow souls of the dead
chirp like crickets.' As far back as the time of Homer, the ghosts
make a similar sound, 'and even as bats flit gibbering in the secret
place of a wonderful cavern, even so the souls gibbered as they fared
together.'[52]
Ghosts, when they make their appearance, are generally supposed, as
already noticed, to have a perfect resemblance, in every respect, to
the deceased person. Their faces appear the same--except that they are
usually paler than when alive--and the ordinary expression is described
by writers on the subject as 'more in sorrow than in anger.' Thus, when
the ghost of Banquo rises and takes a seat at the table, Macbeth says
to the apparition--
Never shake
Thy gory locks at me.
And Horatio tells Marcellus how the ghost of Hamlet's father was not
only fully armed, but--
So frown'd he once, when in angry parle,
He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice.
The folk-lore stories from most parts of the world coincide in this
idea. It was recorded of the Indians of Brazil by one of the early
European visitors that 'they believe that the dead arrive in the
other world, wounded or hacked to pieces, in fact, just as they left
this;'[53] a statement which reminds us of a ghost described by Mrs.
Crowe,[54] who, on appearing after death, was seen to have the very
small-pox marks which had disfigured its countenance when in the flesh.
As in life, so in death, it would seem that there are different classes
of ghosts--the princely, the aristocratic, the genteel, and the
common. The vulgar class, it is said, delight to haunt 'in graveyards,
dreary lanes, ruins, and all sorts of dirty dark holes and corners.'
An amusing anecdote illustrative of this belief was related by the
daughter of 'the celebrated Mrs. S.' [Siddons?] who told Mrs. Crowe
that when her parents were travelling in Wales they stayed some days
at Oswestry, and lodged in a house which was in a very dirty and
neglected state, yet all night long the noise of scrubbing and moving
furniture made it impossible to sleep. The servants did little or no
work, for they had to sit up with their mistress to allay her fears.
The neighbours said that this person had killed an old servant, hence
the disturbance and her terror. Mr. and Mrs. S---- coming in suddenly
one day, heard her cry out, 'Are you there again? Fiend! go away!' But
numerous tales similar to the above are still current in different
parts of the country; and from time to time are duly chronicled in the
local press.
FOOTNOTES:
[31] _Principles of Sociology_, 1885, i. p. 174.
[32] _De Anima_, p. 9; see Tylor's _Primitive Culture_, i. p. 456.
[33] _Principles of Sociology_, 1885, i. p. 174.
[34] See Tylor's _Primitive Culture_, i. p. 457.
[35] Dorman's _Primitive Superstitions_, p. 20.
[36] Tylor's _Primitive Culture_, i. p. 456.
[37] Letourneau's _Sociology_, p. 253.
[38] See Tylor's _Anthropology_, 1881, p. 344.
[39] _Nineteenth Century_, July 1885, pp. 143-144, 'Transylvanian
Superstitions,' by Madame Emily de Laszowska Gerard.
[40] Ralston's _Songs of the Russian People_, p. 117.
[41] _Myths and Dreams_, 1885, p. 184.
[42] _Myths and Myth-makers_, 1873, p. 225.
[43] See Hunt's _Popular Romances of the West of England_, p. 373.
[44] _Fasti_, v. 457.
[45] _Primitive Superstitions_, p. 195.
[46] _The Origin of Civilisation, and the Primitive Condition of Man_,
1870, p. 140; see Letourneau's _Sociology_, p. 263.
[47] Brinton's _Myths of the New World_, 1868, p. 257.
[48] Dorman's _Primitive Superstitions_, 1881, p. 193.
[49] See Lecky's _Rationalism in Europe_, 1870, i. p. 340; cf. Maury's
_Légendes Pieuses_, p. 124.
[50] _Primitive Culture_, i. p. 455.
[51] See Andrew Lang's _Myth, Ritual, Religion_, i. p. 108.
[52] _Odyssey_, xxiv.
[53] Tylor's _Primitive Culture_, i. p. 451.
[54] _Night Side of Nature._