CHAPTER XIII.

FUNERAL RITES.

{277}

If I have made clear the corporate character of the clan, or _gens_,

as conceived by savage thought, the reader will have understood how

completely the clan is regarded as an unity, literally and not

metaphorically one body, the individual members of which are as truly

portions as the fingers or the legs are portions of the external,

visible body of each of them. We saw in previous chapters that a

severed limb, a lock of hair or a nail-clipping, was still regarded as

in some invisible but real union with the body whereof it once, in

outward appearance also, formed part; and any injury inflicted on the

severed portion was inflicted on the bulk. The individual member of a

clan was in exactly the same position as a lock of hair cut from the

head, or an amputated limb. He had no separate significance, no value

apart from his kin. More than that: as we shall see hereafter, injury

inflicted on him was inflicted on, and was felt by, the whole kin,

just as an injury inflicted on the severed lock or limb was felt by

the bulk. This unity of the clan is constantly renewed by the common

meal, where the same food is partaken of, and becomes incorporated

into the essence of all who share it. In strictness commensal rights

belong {278} only to the kin. To eat together means to be of the same

flesh and blood, for none others could do so. Such a rule of course

came to be modified as soon as hospitality was recognised as a duty or

a privilege. But the stranger admitted as a guest to the meal became

by that act a temporary member of the kin. The rights conceded to him

so long as he remained a guest were the rights of kinship, and

entailed corresponding liabilities. He could not, however, share the

common meal in its most solemn form, namely, the totem sacrifice,

without becoming a blood-brother, and thus entering the kin as a

permanent member. In mingling his blood with the blood of the clan,

and feeding with them on the totem-animal, he became one with them as

much as if he had been already united with them in a common descent.

Abandoning his former country and kin and worship, he identified

himself with a new organism having a different domicile with different

rights and interests and a different cult.

The common meal was thus the pledge and witness of the unity of the

kin, because it was the chief means, if not of making, at least of

repairing and renewing it. And its importance is emphasised everywhere

by its repetition upon every solemn occasion, and by its forming the

centre of the entire ritual. This may be taken for granted of many

such occasions; but it may seem strange to assign it a position so

prominent in some. It is not obvious, for instance, how it can be the

most important act of a funeral. The funeral feast, however, is

probably universal; and in savage communities it is difficult to

overrate its significance. The most archaic form, if barbarity be a

test of archaism, in which it is known to us, is where the meat is

nothing less than the corpse of the departed kinsman. Cannibalism in

{279} any form excites so much horror in civilised mankind that we

hesitate to believe it is a stage through which we have all passed.

But it is certainly a custom very widely spread and characteristic of

a low plane of culture. We cannot, and we need not, now discuss

cannibalism in general. Of all the forms it has ever assumed, the most

horrible is that of the eating of the bodies of our nearest and

dearest; and that is the form we have to consider.

In considering it, and recalling, as we must, some of the repulsive

details of the rite, we cannot do better than begin by reminding

ourselves of the anecdote related by Herodotus of the Persian king,

Darius, to illustrate the power of custom. He tells us that the

monarch once called into his presence some Greeks, who were in the

habit of burning their dead, and asked them for what reward they would

be willing to devour the bodies of their parents. They replied, of

course, that nothing would induce them to do such a thing. Then

summoning certain Kalatiai, an Indian people who used to eat their

dead, in the presence of the Greeks (who were informed by an

interpreter of what was being said) he put the converse question to

them, for how much they would burn their deceased parents. They, on

the other hand, broke out into exclamations, begging him to desist

from such ill-omened language. Leaving the moral of this story to be

digested as we proceed, we may review some of the other accounts by

ancient and modern travellers of the practice under consideration. The

Father of History ascribes it not only to the Kalatiai. Among Indian

peoples he mentions the Padaioi, concerning whom he furnishes us with

a little more detail. The Padaioi were a race of nomads alleged to

feed on raw flesh. When any of the tribesmen fell sick they were {280}

mercilessly put to death by their most intimate associates, by which

expression is perhaps meant their fellow-clansmen. The men were killed

by the men, and the women by the women. They sacrificed all who

arrived at old age, and feasted upon them. But these were not

numerous, because they slaughtered every one attacked by disease. That

even the latter were intended to be eaten is clear from the reason for

putting them to death, namely, that otherwise as they were wasted by

sickness their flesh would be utterly spoilt.[280.1] In this respect

they differed for the worse from the Massagetai, the Scythian nation

whose fierce and masculine queen overcame the mighty Cyrus. They only

ate the aged. Those who died of disease they stowed away in the earth,

accounting it a misfortune that they had not come to be sacrificed.

The kindred of an old man would assemble and immolate him, as well as

other animals at the same time; and then boiling the flesh all

together they would feast upon it. The Issedones, also Scythians, seem

to have been somewhat less savage, for we gather that they waited

until a natural death removed the aged. When once a man’s father was

dead, the rite, however, was not different from that of the

Massagetai, save that we are told they preserved the skull, set it in

gold, and used it at their solemn yearly festivals.[280.2] Herodotus

is not the only writer of antiquity who attributes this kind of {281}

cannibalism to savage tribes. The geographer Strabo likewise records

of the Derbikes in the Caucasus that the men of seventy and upwards

were put to death and eaten by their nearest kinsmen, but the women

were buried; for they never used for food the flesh of any female

animal. And the ancient Irish, more savage, he tells us, than the

Britons, considered it praiseworthy to devour their dead fathers,

though he admits very fairly that his authority for the statement is

not decisive.[281.1] In the Middle Ages Marco Polo found a tribe in

Tartary, whose capital he calls Chandul, who used to cook and eat men

condemned to death. Those who died by natural means, on the other

hand, they did not eat.[281.2] It is doubtful whether he refers to

criminals as thus eaten; and he is silent as to who joined in the

feast. No such ambiguity attaches to the usage reported by the

Venetian adventurer as existing in the kingdom of Deragola on the

island of Sumatra. The savages of this kingdom, when any kinsman fell

sick, used to send for their shamans, who made incantations to

ascertain whether he would recover. If the answer were favourable,

nature was left to do her best; if unfavourable, they sent for the

professional slaughterman, by whom he was suffocated and cooked. The

next of kin then assembled and devoured him, afterwards enclosing his

bones in a coffin, which was put away in a mountain cavern.[281.3]

Less authentic are the accounts preserved by the author of Sir John

Maundeville’s travels concerning the East Indian islands. He

attributes a similar practice to the inhabitants of islands he calls

Caffolos and Dondun. Of that of Rybothe he relates that a dead body is

given {282} to the birds of prey, but that the son of the deceased

makes a feast, and serves the flesh of the head to his particular

friends, making a drinking cup of the skull, which he uses for the

rest of his life.[282.1] Other mediæval writers ascribe the same

species of cannibalism to Tibetan tribes.[282.2]

These statements have received confirmation in modern times from the

reports of travellers among tribes in the lower savagery almost

everywhere. As in the older writers, there is some ambiguity on the

question who was expected or entitled to partake of the horrible food.

A comparison, however, of the accounts clearly shows that it was

originally confined to the clan, though possibly the melancholy

satisfaction of uniting oneself with the departed in this manner may,

in different places, have been extended by special favour to intimate

friends not belonging to the kin, or, by a modification of tribal

customs, to the entire local organisation. Not to weary the reader I

have selected in a note at the foot of the page a number of references

to cases where the rite is reported to exist in full force;[282.3] and

I now propose {283} to examine some changes and adaptations of its

form down to its latest survivals in the folklore of civilised Europe.

But first of all we may take note of some observances among the

American aborigines, which, though not connected with funerals, afford

us a glimpse of the sacramental {284} character of a feast upon a

kinsman’s body. The Totonacas, a tribe of the Mexican Chichimecs, used

to slay periodically three of their children and mix the blood with

certain herbs from the temple-garden, and the sap of the _Cassidea

elastica_, into the consistency of dough, which was called _toyoliayt

la quatl_ (Food of our Life). Every six months all adults of the tribe

were required to partake of it as a kind of Eucharist. And the

compiler, from whom I take the account, sarcastically adds: “They thus

partook of human blood without previous miraculous transformation.”

The Cacivos of Peru are also said to sacrifice and eat a voluntary

victim every year.[284.1] The Aztecs and the peoples allied to them

are infamous for the hideous barbarity of their human sacrifices; and

indeed it is incalculable what benefits were conferred on these

unhappy nations in the softening of manners and the refinement of

character, not to mention the salvation of immortal souls, when the

sanguinary rites of Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli were swept away,

to make room for the Unbloody Sacrifice of the Mass and the hecatombs

of the Holy Inquisition. Among the Aztecs a prisoner of war was

esteemed his captor’s son. He was generally sacrificed at the feast of

Xipetotec, deity of the goldsmiths, and Huitzilopochtli. The body was

returned to the captor, who cut it up and divided it between {285} his

superiors, relations and friends, not tasting it himself, because “he

counted it as the flesh of his own body.” He gave the skin to be worn

for twenty days by another, who went about during that time collecting

gifts for the captor. At another festival of Huitzilopochtli a dough

statue of the god was made with certain seeds and the blood of

children. It was formally “killed” at the conclusion of the

ceremonies, by means of a flint-tipped dart, and then cut up and eaten

by the male part of the population. This was called the killing and

eating of the god.[285.1] Nor can we doubt that we have in these rites

vestiges of totemistic feasts at which the totem-victim was not

improbably represented by a kinsman.

We return to funeral feasts. The Fans of Equatorial West Africa have

repeatedly been charged with this kind of cannibalism, but, while

asserting it of their neighbours, have always denied it of themselves.

The solution seems to lie in the fact that they sell their dead to the

Osebas, who are recognised as a kindred race, and buy in return Oseba

bodies for the purpose of consumption.[285.2] In short, repugnance to

eat their own relatives has sprung up, without entire abandonment of

anthropophagy. A curious compromise between burial in the earth and in

the bodies of living members of the tribe appears in an account of the

ceremonies on the death of a recent king of the Bangala. He was cut in

two lengthwise, and another man slain for the purpose was treated in

like manner. One half of the one, and a half of the other, were then

put together, so as to {286} form an entire man, and buried. The

remaining halves were stewed with manioc and bananas and eaten with

other sacrifices.[286.1] In some cases the flesh of the dead is only

eaten in the delirium of grief, or as a mark of particular affection.

The latter is related to have frequently happened on the demise of a

Hawaiian chief.[286.2] For the same reason mothers, among the

Botocudos of South America, ate their dead children.[286.3] While in

California the Gallinomero burnt the body immediately life became

extinct; and the frenzy of survivors reached such a pitch that one of

them has been seen to rush up to the pyre, snatch a handful of blazing

flesh, and devour it on the spot.[286.4] A method of consuming the

corpse adopted by the savage tribes inhabiting the valley of the

Uaupes, a tributary of the Amazons, is described by Dr. Wallace. Their

houses are generally built to accommodate the entire community; and

the dead are buried beneath the floor. About a month after the

funeral, Dr. Wallace tells us, the survivors “disinter the corpse,

which is then much decomposed, and put it in a great pan, or oven,

over the fire, till all the volatile parts are driven off with a most

horrible odour, leaving only a black carbonaceous mass, which is

pounded into a fine powder, and mixed in several large _couchés_

(vats made of hollowed trees) of a fermented drink called _caxirí_;

this is drunk by the assembled company till all is finished; they

believe that thus the virtues of the deceased will be transmitted to

the drinkers.” Similar customs are reported of {287} other South

American peoples.[287.1] Among the Koniagas, an Eskimo tribe of Alaska

and the adjacent islands, when a whaler dies, one method of disposing

of his body is to place it in a cave. There his fellow-craftsmen

congregate, before setting out upon a chase. They take the body out,

immerse it in a stream and then drink of the water.[287.2]

Speaking generally, the practice of eating a dead kinsman, which is

probably the earliest form of cannibalism, is also the earliest form

to be abandoned. In the South Sea Islands, for example, where the

custom of eating strangers has continued until recent years, the flesh

of one’s own tribesmen is rejected, save in rare instances, such as

that of Hawaii. In the Banks’ Islands it is occasionally eaten, in

order to establish communion with a dead man for magical purposes: a

practice likewise known in Australia.[287.3] But though the custom

changes, the sacramental idea underlying it is retained; and the

problem would be how to effect the necessary union between the dead

and the living without partaking of the body. On the island of Vate,

in the New Hebrides, the aged were put to death by burying them alive.

A hole was dug, and the victim placed within it in a sitting posture,

a live pig tied to each arm. Before closing the grave, the cords were

cut; and the pigs were afterwards killed and served up at the funeral

feast.[287.4] In this way they seem to be identified with the corpse.

In Europe, where flesh is not consumed ceremonially at {288} the

funeral feast, other means even more expressive are taken to ensure

the same object. In the Balkan peninsula the rites are very

significant. In Albania, cakes of boiled wheat and other ingredients

are carried in the funeral procession, and eaten by the mourners upon

the grave as soon as it is filled up. All expressions of sorrow are

repressed as sinful while it is being eaten; and as each person takes

his share he says: “May he (or she) be forgiven!”[288.1] In some parts

of the peninsula the cakes bear the image of the dead. They are broken

up and eaten upon the tomb immediately after interment, every mourner

pronouncing the words: “God rest him!”[288.2] At Calymnos, among the

Greeks, the funeral, as elsewhere, takes place on the day of death.

Kólyva cakes like those in Albania are then made, and are guarded in

the house of the departed all night, with two lighted candles, by a

watcher who must not go to sleep. The next day they are carried first

to the church and then to the tomb, on which they are set to be

distributed. The eating of Kólyva cakes is repeated with similar

ceremonies on the third, ninth and fortieth days, and again at the end

of three, six and nine months and of one, two and three years, after

death.[288.3] It is impossible to {289} mistake the meaning of these

practices: the image of the dead upon the cakes, the acts of carrying

them in the funeral procession and eating them upon the grave,

elsewhere the night-watching, and everywhere the cessation of mourning

and the pious exclamations during eating, all admit of but one

interpretation.

The ritual eating of special food is used at funerals in many

countries. Pulse is not mentioned as an ingredient of the Kólyva

cakes. It was, however, an important part of the funeral feasts of the

Romans; and Mr. F. B. Jevons, commenting on Plutarch, has quoted

Porphyry’s statement, that Pythagoras bade his followers “abstain from

beans as from human flesh,” and the reason mentioned by Pliny as

entertained by some for the prohibition, namely, that the souls of the

dead are in them.[289.1] The various taboos and other superstitions

connected with beans point to the correctness of this reason, and tend

to show that pulse was in some way identified with human flesh. In the

French provinces of Berry and the Marche, a plate of beans, or of

dried peas, always figures among the provisions of the funeral

banquet.[289.2] In the Marches of Italy the family on returning from

the burial-ground sit down together to a large plate of beans.[289.3]

In some parts of Friuli a soup of beans is distributed; in other

places cakes of barley, or grated cheese. Elsewhere a loaf or cake of

_pan di tremeste_, composed of rye and vetch, is given, with wine or

brandy, to all who come to chant the rosary and other prayers over the

corpse on the evening of death.[289.4] In the neighbourhood {290} of

Rimini the feast consists of a broth of chick-pease.[290.1] But the

form assumed by the ritual food is usually either cakes or fermented

liquor, frequently both. Cakes called _wastê_ are eaten in the

Ardennes.[290.2] In Wales it seems that a hot plum-cake fresh from the

oven used to be handed round to the guests, broken in pieces, not cut

with a knife. In Sardinia, on the seventh or ninth day after death,

savoury cakes are prepared and sent hot from the oven to all the

relatives and neighbours, and to all who have joined in the weeping

for the dead, or accompanied the corpse to the tomb. The family then

gathers at supper, celebrating the virtues of the deceased between the

mouthfuls of food and their tears.[290.3] Dough-nuts, among the Turks,

are sent to friends and to the poor on the third, seventh, and

fortieth days after the funeral; and prayers for the soul are

requested in return.[290.4] Bread carried in the funeral procession is

distributed to the poor by the Tamil population of Ceylon.[290.5] On

one of the Banks’ Islands, “when a great man dies, the people from all

the villages around bring mashed yams the next morning to the place

where the dead man lies and eat them there.”[290.6] Among the

Abyssinians the poor receive from the banquet pieces of bread and of

the entrails and liver of the animals which are served up.[290.7]

{291} The Tcheremiss of the Kama and the Volga provide small pancakes,

which they eat as soon as the grave is filled up, every one depositing

three morsels upon the grave, saying: “This is for thee.”[291.1]

In several of the cases cited the eating of the dead has evidently

undergone a natural transformation into eating with the dead. But

wherever a special food is used it may be suspected to represent the

flesh of the deceased. In the funeral cakes of the Balkan peninsula

the identity is manifest. I shall try to show that it is the same

nearer home. In various parts of England and Wales a custom of giving

small sponge-cakes to the guests is yet in force. In Yorkshire and

elsewhere the last part of the funeral entertainment before the

procession started for the churchyard was to hand round glasses of

wine and small circular crisp sponge-cakes, whereof most of the guests

partook. These cakes were called “Avril-bread.” The word _Avril_ is

said to be derived from _arval_, succession-ale, heir-ale, the name of

the feasts given by Icelandic heirs on succeeding to property.[291.2]

Now, although it might be suspected that the avril-bread represented

the corpse, we should not be justified in holding that it did without

more direct evidence. That evidence can fortunately be supplied, from

a funeral which took place near Market Drayton in Shropshire on the

1st {292} July 1893, as described by an eye-witness. “The lady,”

writes Miss Gertrude Hope, “who gave me the particulars, arrived

rather early, and found the bearers enjoying a good lunch in the only

downstairs room. Shortly afterwards the coffin was brought down and

placed on two chairs in the centre of the room, and the mourners

having gathered round it,” a short service was then and there

conducted by the Nonconformist minister, as is frequently done, before

setting out for the grave. “Directly the minister ended, the woman in

charge of the arrangements poured out four glasses of wine and handed

one to each bearer present across the coffin, with a biscuit called a

‘funeral biscuit.’ One of the bearers being absent at the moment, the

fourth glass of wine and biscuit were offered to the eldest son of the

deceased woman, who, however, refused to take it, and was not obliged

to do so. The biscuits were ordinary sponge biscuits, usually called

‘sponge fingers’ or ‘lady’s fingers.’ They are, however, also known in

the shops of Market Drayton as ‘funeral biscuits.’” These cakes are

not exactly of the shape mentioned by Canon Atkinson as used in

Yorkshire, but that is of no importance, because their shape varies

with the place. What follows is enough to show that the scene

described is not a solitary one. “The minister, who had lately come

from Pembrokeshire, remarked to my informant that he was sorry to see

that pagan custom still observed. He had been able to put an end to it

in the Pembrokeshire village where he had formerly been.”[292.1]

Here, it will be observed, the ritual food is handed across the

coffin. Pennant, writing early in the fourth quarter of the eighteenth

century, says that in Wales “previous to a {293} funeral, it was

customary, when the corpse was brought out of the house and laid upon

the bier, for the next of kin, be it widow, mother, sister or daughter

(for it must be a female), to give, over the coffin, a quantity of

white loaves, in a great dish, and sometimes a cheese, with a piece of

money stuck in it, to certain poor persons. After that, they present,

in the same manner, a cup of drink, and require the persons to drink a

little of it immediately.” The Lord’s Prayer was then repeated by the

minister, if present; and the procession started.[293.1] We can have

little doubt that this was the same custom. A hundred years earlier

still it was witnessed by John Aubrey at Beaumaris. He mentions it as

occurring when the corpse is brought out of doors. The food consisted

of cake and cheese, with “a new Bowle of Beere, and another of Milke

with ye Anno Dni ingraved on it, & ye parties name deceased.” And Dr.

Kennett, who annotated his manuscript, refers to a practice at

Amersden, in Oxfordshire, of bringing to the minister in the

church-porch after the interment a cake and a flagon of ale.[293.2] In

Wales and the Welsh border the custom underwent a curious development.

It became, for some cause, a profession to eat this funeral meal, and

thereby, as was believed, to become responsible for the sins of the

deceased. Aubrey describes one of these Sin-eaters, as they were

called. “One of them I remember lived in a Cottage on Rosse-high way.

(He was a long, leane, ugly, lamentable poor raskal.) The manner was

that when the Corps was brought out of the house and layd on the

Biere, a Loafe of bread was brought out, and delivered to the

Sinne-eater over the corps, as also a Mazar-bowle of maple (Gossips

bowle) full of beer, wch he was to drinke up, and {294} sixpence in

money, in consideration whereof he tooke upon him (ipso facto) all the

Sinnes of the Defunct, and freed him (or her) from walking after they

were dead.”[294.1] The profession of Sin-eater and the full ceremony,

pagan enough in all conscience, have vanished from the earth only

within the lifetime of persons yet living. The most modern account of

it was given by Mr. Matthew Moggridge of Swansea to the Cambrian

Archaeological Association at Ludlow in the year 1852. He said that

“when a person died, the friends sent for the Sin-eater of the

district, who on his arrival placed a plate of salt on the breast of

the defunct, and upon the salt a piece of bread. He then muttered an

incantation over the bread, which he finally ate, thereby eating up

all the sins of the deceased. This done, he received his fee of 2s.

6d.” (a modest fee for the service, all things considered, though it

had risen since Aubrey’s day), “and vanished as quickly as possible

from the general gaze; for as it was believed that he really

appropriated to his own use and behoof the sins of all those over whom

he performed the above ceremony, he was utterly detested in the

neighbourhood--regarded as a mere Pariah--as one irredeemably lost.”

Mr. Moggridge specified the neighbourhood of Llandebie, about twelve

or thirteen miles from Swansea, as a place where the custom had

survived to within a recent period.[294.2]

{295}

Thus in our own country we find the relics of a ritual feast, where

food is placed upon the coffin, or rather upon the body itself, or

handed across it, and so in a manner identified with it, and where it

is expressly believed that by the act of eating some properties of the

dead are taken over by the eater. Let us now turn back for a moment to

the East. At a Hindu funeral in Sindh the relations, in the course of

the march to the place of burning, throw dry dates into the air over

the corpse. These, we are told, are considered as a kind of alms, and

are left to the poor. On returning to the house, after the cremation,

the first thing done is to offer the couch, bedding, and some clothes

of the deceased to a Karnigor who is in attendance. A Karnigor is a

low caste-man,--according to some, the offspring of a Brahman father

and a Sudra mother. North of Hydrabad his appearance and conduct

resemble those of the servile, south of that city those of the

priestly, order. The condition of the gift is, that the Karnigor must

eat a certain sweetmeat prepared for the occasion. If he refuse, the

ghost of the dead man would haunt the place. This means that the

funeral rites would have been incomplete. The Karnigor has, therefore,

the game in his own hands; and, rejecting the first advance, he

demands not only all the articles of dress left by the departed, but

fees into the bargain. “When his avarice is satiated, he eats four or

five mouthfuls of the sweetmeat, seldom more, for fear of the spirit.

After this, he carries off his plunder, taking care not to look behind

him, as the Pinniyaworo [head mourner] and the person who prepared the

confectionery {296} wait until he is fifteen or twenty paces off,

break up all the earthen cooking pots that have been used, and throw

three of the broken pieces at him, in token of abhorrence.”[296.1] Can

we fail to be reminded of the Sin-eater? Nor is this the most

remarkable parallel to be found in India. The burning of the corpse of

a king of Tanjore who died in 1801, and of two of his widows chosen

for the purpose by the Brahmans, is described by the abbé Dubois. He

states that a part of the bones which escaped the fury of the flames

was reduced to powder, and this powder, having been mixed with boiled

rice, was eaten by twelve Brahmans. The reason for the proceeding is

put by the abbé almost in the very words I quoted in the last

paragraph. The act “had for its object the expiation of the sins of

the defunct persons: sins which, according to common opinion, are

transmitted into the bodies of those whom the allurement of gain has

induced to surmount the repugnance that a food so detestable should

inspire. Moreover, people are persuaded that the money which is the

price of this base condescension is never of any profit to

them.”[296.2] If any doubt could remain as to the meaning of the Welsh

custom, this would be enough to dissipate it. But in truth it is not

needed; for we have in Europe other usages that set the meaning in the

clearest light. In the Highlands of Bavaria, when the corpse is placed

upon the bier, the room is carefully {297} washed out and cleaned.

Formerly it was the custom for the housewife then to prepare the

_Leichen-nudeln_, or Corpse-cakes. Having kneaded the dough, she

placed it to rise on the dead body, as it lay there enswathed in a

linen shroud. When the dough had risen, the cakes were baked for the

expected guests. To the cakes so prepared, the belief attached that

they contained the virtues and advantages of the departed, and that

thus the living strength of the deceased passed over, by means of the

corpse-cakes, into the kinsmen who consumed them, and so was retained

within the kindred.[297.1] Here we find ourselves at an earlier stage

in the disintegration of tradition than in the Welsh practice. The

identification of the food with the dead man is not merely symbolic.

The dough in rising is believed actually to absorb his qualities,

which are transmitted to those of his kin who partake of the cakes;

and--consistently with the requirement that the relatives eat the

cakes--the qualities transferred are held to be not evil but good

ones: the living strength, the virtues and so on of the dead are

retained within the kin. Not less striking than the resemblance just

pointed out between the objects of the Hindu and the Welsh rites, is

that between the objects of {298} the Bavarian custom and that of the

Tariánas and other tribes of the Uaupes for consuming the pounded

remains of their kinsmen in their caxirí. In both cases, indeed,

there is more than resemblance. The objects are absolutely the same;

and it is inconceivable that the European usages wherewith we are

dealing had any other origin than a cannibal feast, the material of

which was the very body of the deceased kinsman.

It is natural to inquire whether any trace of this cannibalism lingers

among the Irish, who alone among European races have been charged with

it. There is a trace, though it must be admitted a fainter trace than

we have found on this side of Saint George’s Channel. Yet I think when

we compare it with the latter we shall conclude that it is enough, and

therefore that in all probability Strabo’s accusation was not

unfounded. The drinking which goes on at a wake is of course a relic

of the funeral feast. It takes place in the presence of the corpse. A

foreigner, describing a nobleman’s obsequies which he witnessed at

Shrewsbury in the early years of King Charles the Second, states that

the minister made a funeral oration in the chamber where the body lay,

and “during the oration there stood upon the coffin a large pot of

wine, out of which every one drank to the health of the deceased. This

being finished six men took up the corps, and carried it on their

shoulders to the church.”[298.1] I am not aware whether in Ireland the

whisky is thus brought into immediate contiguity with the bier. In

Connaught it was the custom about a generation ago, and probably still

is, to place a plate of tobacco cut in short lengths, and a plate of

snuff on the breast of the corpse; a boy stood at the door with a

{299} basket of pipes, and each person helped himself according to his

inclination.[299.1] Whatever may be the case as regards tobacco, I am

informed by eye-witnesses that it is still an Irish custom to lay a

plate of snuff on the breast of the dead; and everybody who attends

the funeral is expected to take a pinch. This ceremony must have

assumed its present shape in recent times; but it cannot be doubted

that it represents the more archaic consumption of food or drink

similarly placed.

I mentioned just now that dates were thrown, at a funeral in Sindh,

over the corpse, and left to the poor. Before the funeral at Calymnos,

figs and other fruit contributed by the relatives of the deceased, are

carried from his house to the churchyard and there distributed among

the poor.[299.2] In classic times the Greeks and Romans used to offer

to the manes of the departed on the ninth day after the burial; and on

the steps of the grave-monument a simple meal of milk, honey, oil and

the blood of the sacrificed animals was prepared. If the tomb were

large enough, there was a separate apartment provided, where the meal

was consumed. As numerous guests were impossible in the limited space

ordinarily available, the wealthy used often to distribute flesh-meat

among the people, and in later times money.[299.3] To-day, in the

Abruzzi, when a {300} maiden dies, comfits and money are distributed

during the procession from the house to the church, and in some places

also from the church to the graveyard, just as they are distributed

during a wedding procession. This perhaps has no significance for our

present inquiry; but the funeral feast which follows the burial must

not be left unnoticed. Its material is provided by the most intimate

friend of the dead,[300.1] who sometimes joins in it. No one else is

admitted beside relatives. The table whereon the coffin has rested is

the one used for the meal, and if not large enough, others are added

to it to extend it. On returning to the house the party, after an

interval of solemn silence, begin by telling their beads. The nearest

of kin, one after the other, hand round the food, and the life and

merits of the defunct are the invariable subject of conversation. They

repeatedly press one another to eat and drink. This and the talk about

the departed, from the way they are mentioned, appear to be important

parts of the ceremony. The utensils must be returned empty and

unwashed to the friend who has furnished the meal. Nothing eatable may

be sent back: it must be finished by the servants and those who have

taken part in the preparations for the funeral. Nor may the meal be

taken in the usual room.[300.2]

Several things are noteworthy in the Abruzzian feast; and there are

few readers with the ceremonies we have {301} been discussing in their

minds, who will not come to the conclusion that where the solemn

banquet is spread on the table where the corpse has previously lain,

where there is mutual urging to eat and nothing is permitted to be

left, and where the virtues of the deceased are discussed as part of

the rite, there is a presumption that the feast was originally upon

the flesh of the dead. Among the Masurs, though we hear nothing about

the requirement to finish the food, special food is provided, which we

already know as a suspicious circumstance. Combined with the other

details I am about to give, I venture to think it affords fairly

strong evidence as to the original character of the mortuary feast.

The body is placed on a table in the middle of the room, and the

neighbours and relatives assemble round it. Buns and schnaps are

placed on the table for the men; and the schnaps is drunk in turn out

of the same glass. The women drink it with a spoon from a bowl.

Suitable religious songs are sung. After the funeral, schnaps

thickened with honey is served to the women on the same table; and at

the feast which follows, presumably on the same table, groats mingled

with honey are a special dish. In some districts the body is covered

with a table-cloth, which is afterwards put over the funeral bakemeats

on the table; and no one can take them until it is removed. At the

meal all drink in brandy to the everlasting rest of the

departed.[301.1]

In classical times and classical lands, as we saw, the tables were

spread at the tomb. At Argentière, in the department of the Hautes

Alpes, France, this continues to be done immediately after the burial;

and the table of the curé and the family is placed upon the grave

itself. The dinner {302} ended, every one, led by the next of kin,

drinks the health of the departed. Here the situation of the chief

table is unambiguous. We should hesitate to say so much of the

classical feast, or of the custom prescribed by the ritual of the

monastery of Saint Ouen at Rouen, where after the abbot’s death a

repast of spices and wine was given in his chamber.[302.1] Neither the

celebration of the formal meal in the death-chamber nor at the grave

is conclusive of itself. When once the practice of eating the dead was

abandoned, and only a symbol of the loathsome food remained, the

meaning of the symbol would tend to pass out of memory, and, according

to varying circumstances, sooner or later the symbol itself would

undergo change and disappear. The totem-feast, on the other hand, of

which it may be plausibly maintained the cannibal feast on the dead

kinsman was originally part, shorn of its most savage detail, would

remain in full vigour. So far as it was a funeral observance it would

receive a specific development with appropriate surroundings, and its

totemistic character would gradually be forgotten. Moreover, it is

possible that the cannibal feast was by no means universal at any

time. However this may be, the totem-feast being a sacramental rite, a

communion between the living members of a clan and their totem, one of

the most obvious extensions of the sacramental idea would be that of

communion with the dead. The latter would be supposed to join in the

feast and partake of the food: a portion of which would accordingly be

reserved for them. And as the deceased member of the clan would be

supposed to be sojourning at his grave, it would of course be greatly

for the convenience of all parties that the feast should be held {303}

there, and the portion meant for him deposited in or upon the tomb.

Death had not relieved him of the wants of life; but it had released

him from certain of its limitations. The conditions of his existence

were changed. While in some directions he had been deprived of power,

in others he had become possessed of greater power than during life;

and all beings possessed of extraordinary power were regarded with

distrust. Savage man felt himself capricious, revengeful, envious,

cruel. The feelings he experienced, the feelings he saw manifested in

his fellow-men, he attributed to the mightier creatures of his

imagination. Now life was, in his contemplation, so much more

desirable than death, that the dead would naturally have been supposed

to envy the living. Here was a distinct cause of ill-will. The dead

man must, therefore, be kept from haunting the survivors. To that end

his funeral rites must be fully and properly performed, and every

precaution taken both to persuade him to stay at a distance and to

prevent him from finding his way back. One means to do this was to

provide him with food in or upon his sepulchre. He would thus be

induced to abide there, or, as the case might be, to take his

departure straight thence to the dwelling-place of spirits, and not to

linger among the kindred who were anxious to be rid of him. This

belief gave rise to the repetition of feasts of the dead, for the

needs of the dead must be constantly supplied. Besides, to keep them

in good humour would be to enlist their sympathy and their help; and

who could know how much that help might mean against enemies, or in

the chase, or in the operations of agriculture? Thus, not only love

for the departed, and the desire for communion with them, but every

other motive concurred on the one hand to provide {304} them with

food, and on the other hand to consult their convenience in

facilitating their enjoyment of it. The reasoning was not free from

inconsistencies, because there were cross-currents of tradition. All

of them did not flow from the habit of looking upon the dead as

abiding permanently in their graves. Probably this was the original

faith. But the belief in a separate realm of souls grew up as culture

advanced, and disturbed the earlier tradition. The possibility of

return to life by a new birth into the kin was another opinion that

affected it. And the doctrine of Transformation must, from the most

archaic times, have intervened as a modifying influence, for

transformation implies locomotion. The savage did not always trouble

himself to reconcile inconsistencies. His simple credulity accepted

them all. We need not wonder; for even the mind of civilised and

educated man is built in watertight compartments: whereof no reader

will want examples.

The meal at the grave, then, or in the death-chamber, may be a meal at

which the dead man is one of the convives. Instances are numerous in

the lower culture. Some of them, like that of the Tcheremiss Tartars,

have been mentioned; and I select a few more, out of many, further to

illustrate the practice. It will be convenient to begin with the

Tchuvash, whose seats are on the middle reaches of the Volga, because

their customs, if correctly reported, seem, like those of the

Tcheremiss, to show the eating of the dead passing over into the

eating with the dead. After burial in the public cemetery the

relatives deposit on the grave some cakes and a piece of cooked fowl,

saying, like the Tcheremiss: “This is for thee.” The old clothes of

the deceased are thrown over the tomb; and the rest of the cakes are

eaten by the funeral escort, {305} by whom the repast is regarded as

taken in company with the dead. On the fortieth day after burial an

animal, designated by the deceased in his lifetime for that purpose,

is killed. Libations are made, and half the flesh with other food is

deposited on the grave. This is devoured, amid lamentations of the

relatives, by dogs; “for it is believed that the dogs become the

dwelling-place of the souls of the dead. The feasting then begins, and

eating and drinking continue until all the supplies are

exhausted.”[305.1] The Tchuvash appear to be the same people of whom

Hanway, in the middle of the last century, relates that they throw

their dead into the open field to be devoured by dogs, of which many

run wild, and some are kept for the purpose.[305.2] If the dogs become

the dwelling-place of the souls of the dead by eating of the memorial

banquet, we are presented with a result comparable with that obtained

by the Bavarian Highlanders and the Tariánas; and we may conjecture

that in earlier times the deceased was eaten by the kin.

Immediately before the burial of an Ainu, millet-cakes and wine are

handed round to the assembled relatives and friends. Each person

“offers two or three drops of the wine to the spirit of the dead, then

drinks a little, and pours what is left before the fire as an offering

to the fire-goddess, all the time muttering some short prayer. Then

part of the millet-cake is eaten, and the remainder hidden in the

ashes upon the hearth, each person burying a little piece.” After the

body has been interred these fragments are carried out of the hut and

placed together before the eastern window, which is always a sacred

spot.[305.3] When a {306} dead Chinaman is put into his coffin, a

quantity of food is put before him, and afterwards removed and eaten

by his family; and again at the burial eatables are taken from the

house and set on the tomb, and subsequently brought back to be

consumed at the funeral meal.[306.1] Moreover, at each of the

oft-repeated memorial feasts for the departed, some of the food is

first placed before the ancestral tablets, or the tombs, and then

eaten by the family; and it is believed that the spirits partake of

its “essential and immaterial elements.”[306.2] In the funeral rites

of the Dyaks food is set before the dead ere the coffin is closed. It

is allowed to stand for about an hour by the corpse, and is then

devoured by the next-of-kin.[306.3] On the death of a Hungarian Gipsy

he is carried out of the tent or hut. It is now the duty of the

members of his clan to offer to the deceased gifts, especially food

and drink, which they lay beside the body and later on themselves

consume.[306.4] The Sàkalàva of Madagascar bury in a family

cemetery. “A cup and a plate are placed by the side of the coffin, and

every now and then the friends go in large numbers, and taking rice

and rum with them, hold a feast in these cemeteries, and believe that

the spirits of their dead ancestors and relatives come and join

them.”[306.5] The Hillmen of Rájmahál on the death of a chief, hold

a feast where a part of the provisions is dedicated to their god and

to the spirit of the deceased, and thus becoming forbidden {307} to

the survivors, is thrown away.[307.1] On Florida and San Cristoval,

and possibly other of the Solomon Islands, at the funeral feast a bit

of the food is thrown into the fire for the departed, with the words:

“This is for you.” On Lepers’ Island and the Banks’ Islands, the

feasts are repeated for a long period; and a portion is always set

aside with the words: “This is for thee.” On the Banks’ Islands,

indeed, at ordinary meals when the oven is opened a morsel of food is

put aside for the dead with the words: “This is for you; let our oven

be well cooked.”[307.2] The tribes about Lake Nyassa, in Central East

Africa, hold a memorial feast two or three months after the death, of

which the spirit of the deceased is considered to partake.[307.3]

Among some of the Senegambian tribes, when the grave is filled up, a

fowl, with its legs tied, is laid upon the mound, within reach of some

water and boiled rice, which are placed at the head of the grave. If

it eat any of the rice it is killed, the tomb is sprinkled with its

blood, the flesh cooked and partly eaten, partly left for the dead.

This ceremony is repeated at every renewal of the customary

lamentations.[307.4] The Koiari tribe of New Guinea cook food at

stated times, formally present it to the dead man, and then eat

it.[307.5] The Dorah tribesmen on the same island hold a feast two or

three months after the death of a first-born son, when the skull is

produced, adorned with a wooden pair of ears and nose and with eyes of

coloured {308} seeds. The head thus prepared is honoured with a

portion of all the dishes.[308.1] So on the island of Nagir, in Torres

Straits, at the death-dance held three months after the death of a man

whose skull was afterwards sold to Professor Haddon, the skull being

prepared and adorned was placed on a mat in the midst of the assembly.

Food was provided for the immediate relatives, and laid before the

skull. The feast then began; and it must have been accompanied by much

enjoyment, for we are told that all got very drunk.[308.2] Perhaps

this was the way in which the Issedones used the skulls of their dead.

The same intention is doubtless to be understood of the memorial

feast, or Karmantram ceremony, of the Eastern Kullens of Madura, in

Southern India. After a meal, to which the relatives are invited, in

the evening a bier, followed by the kin, is carried with music to the

grave. The dead man’s wife’s brother digs up the corpse, and removes

the skull, which he washes and smears with sandal-wood powder and

spices. He then seats himself on the bier, holding the skull in his

hand, and is carried without music to a shed in front of the house of

the deceased, where the skull is set down, and the relatives weep and

mourn over it until the following noon. The succeeding twenty-four

hours are given over to drunken revelry. This, it will be observed, is

in the presence or immediate neighbourhood of the skull. It is

afterwards carried back by the person who brought it from the grave,

seated again on the bier and accompanied by music. Arrived once more

at the grave, the son or heir of the deceased, at whose expense the

rite is performed, burns the skull and breaks an earthen pot. The

relatives on {309} returning bathe and then feast together,[309.1]--an

ordinary conclusion to a funeral ceremony. Here, if I am right in my

interpretation, only drink is offered--by no means a solitary

instance. The Livonians used to stand round a corpse drinking,

inviting it to partake, and pouring for that purpose a part of the

liquor over it. The pagan Lapps sprinkle the grave with brandy, part

of which is reserved for the mourners at the funeral feast. However,

they also kill the reindeer that draws the body to the burial-ground,

eat the flesh and bury the bones, but in a separate coffin.[309.2]

Among the Peguenches in the south of Chili, when the body is deposited

in the graveyard, but before it is put into the ground, a feast is

prepared. Every one who partakes, before eating throws a morsel of

food towards the corpse, crying out “_Yuca-pai_.”[309.3] At the other

extremity of the Western Continent the Eskimo sometimes pay a formal

visit to the sepulchre taking pieces of deerskin and fat. Of the fat

they eat a portion, standing round the grave, and talking the while to

the dead. Then each of them lays a piece of deerskin (still covered

with the fur) and a piece of fat under a stone, exclaiming: “Here is

something to eat, and something to keep you warm.”[309.4] The feast

with the dead is common among the North American tribes. It is eaten

at the grave. A fire is kindled; and each person before eating cuts

off a small piece of meat which he casts into the fire. The smoke and

smell of this, they say, attracts the {310} ghost to come and eat with

them. Nor only so. The practice of setting aside a portion of their

food for the ghost whenever they eat or drink is continued, sometimes

for years, until they have an opportunity of sending out this memorial

with a war-party, to be thrown down on the field of battle, when their

obligation to the departed ceases.[310.1]

Among the examples I have given, the skull of the dead man often

appears at the festivity. Other representatives of the deceased are

also found. The Tcheremiss _kart_, or shaman, wears the garments of

the deceased; and when the feast is over it is he who gives what is

left to the dogs.[310.2] The Teng-ger tribes of Java accord the most

conspicuous position to a mannikin about a foot and a half high, made

of leaves, dressed in the clothes of the dead and ornamented with

flowers.[310.3] The practice of making images of the dead and

conjuring the spirits into them is not an uncommon one; and wherever

it exists we are justified in assuming that the images would not be

allowed to go without their due share of nourishment at proper times.

The meaning of some ceremonies may not be quite so clear; as when one

tribe of Tartars, having eaten the favourite horse of the departed,

sticks up its head on the grave; or another tribe, killing and eating

a fat mare, hangs her skin from the branches of the tree that shades

the tomb.[310.4] The southern tribes of British Columbia often killed

the horse of the deceased and decked the grave with its skin.[310.5]

The Yoruba of West Africa collect the bones of the fowls and sheep

eaten by the guests, and of the other {311} victims sacrificed, and

place them over the grave.[311.1] The Kamtchadales eat a fish in

memory of the departed and throw the fins into the fire.[311.2] The

Kirghiz Tartars burn on the tomb the bones of the horse they have

eaten--usually the favourite of the dead man.[311.3] Animal bones,

burnt and unburnt, and especially the head of an ox, are frequently

found in opening barrows in this country, pointing to practices on the

part of the prehistoric inhabitants analogous to these.[311.4]

Probably, in many cases at least, they are the remains of a banquet

common to the living and the dead.

The drink bestowed on the dead in some of the foregoing instances

perhaps represents blood; and blood, it will be remembered, was the

share of the totem-god in the sacrificial feasts. Nothing could,

therefore, more plainly bespeak the meaning of these funeral rites. In

some cases, indeed, as we have seen, the blood is sprinkled upon the

grave. So among the Wanyika the corpse when buried holds in its hand a

piece of skin taken from the head of a goat or cow which has been

killed for the feast, and the grave is sprinkled with the blood before

it is filled up.[311.5] The dead body of a Yoruba is spattered with

the blood of a he-goat slain to propitiate the phallic deity, Elegba;

but whether the mourners partake of the flesh we are not told: most

likely they do.[311.6] In the same way wine was sprinkled on a Roman’s

grave--a ceremony of which we find the relic, after cremation began to

be practised, in the formal extinction {312} of the ashes by the

outpouring of wine. The rites of the Todas and Kotas of the Neilgherry

Hills are complicated; and only a portion of them need be noticed in

this connection. The corpse is burnt; but a piece of the scalp and

some of the finger-nails are first cut off and preserved between two

strips of bark as relics. On the anniversary, or some other suitable

day, buffaloes are sacrificed; the relics are rubbed with their blood

and ceremonially burnt; and their flesh is eaten by the Kotas.[312.1]

We may dismiss funeral banquets with one further observation. The

intention of sharing a common meal with the dead is by no means

abandoned at the completion of the funeral ceremonies. The feasts, as

in several cases we have already noted, are repeated at intervals.

Indeed, at all festivals when the entire kin is assembled the deceased

members are conceived as assembled with them; a portion of the food is

set aside, a portion of the drink is poured out for the departed. The

cult of the dead in this form survives into the higher phases of

civilisation. At various times in the year, particularly at Halloween,

all over Europe, the tables are set, the doors are opened, and the

ghosts are invited to partake of the fare provided by their

descendants and relatives; and it is believed that they actually come

and enjoy the food prepared for them, and warm themselves on the

hearth, which, in the days of their flesh, they used to tend, and

around which they used to gather, when work was over, to eat their

frugal fare, and to rejoice one another with social converse and the

performance of domestic rites. A tender custom! and one that pleads

pathetically for its continuance as a witness to {313} a faith in

comparison wherewith Christianity is a thing of yesterday, a faith not

less true than Christianity itself in its recognition and its

consecration of some of the deepest and most vital emotions of our

nature.

There are other ways of forming a sacramental union with the dead.

Among the Tolkotins of Oregon, who burnt their dead, the widow was

compelled to pass her hands through the flame and collect some of the

liquid fat exuding from the body, wherewith to daub herself. The

Modocs appear to have smeared their persons with the blood of any of

their kindred who died violent deaths.[313.1] On the Gilbert Islands

“the nearest relations,” whatever that expression may include, are

said to rub themselves with the saliva which escapes from the mouth in

the agonies of death.[313.2] Other savages rub themselves with the

liquid flowing from the putrefying corpse. There is no need to dwell

on this loathsome custom. It is reported of tribes extending over a

considerable area of the earth’s surface, namely, of the Krumen near

Sierra Leone, the Antankàrana in Madagascar, the aborigines of

Victoria, the Andrawillas in East Central Australia, the Koiari of New

Guinea, the Laughlan Islanders between New Guinea and the Solomon

Islands, the inhabitants of New Britain and the Similkameens of

British Columbia. Of the last we are told in so many words that they

believe that in this way some portion of the deceased becomes

incorporated in them.[313.3] Nay, some {314} peoples, like the Banks’

Islanders and the Aron Islanders imbibe these fluids; but the Nias

Islanders perform the duty by deputy in the persons of their wretched

slaves, who according to one account are suffocated in the

process.[314.1] Of a party of Tasmanians who were deported to Barren

Island we are told that they were seen to collect the ashes of the

dead after burning, and smear a portion of them every morning on their

faces, singing the while a death-song and weeping.[314.2] Among the

Digger Indians of California the relatives are said to cover their

hands and faces with a mixture of tar and the ashes of the

deceased.[314.3] And the Correguajes Indians of New Granada burn the

bones when the wild beasts have removed the flesh, and use the ashes

as a pigment for painting themselves, “the relatives having the first

right to its use.”[314.4] Earlier in the chapter I mentioned a method

of dealing with the dead body of a Koniaga whaler. An alternative

method is to cut it into small pieces and distribute it among the

other whalers, each of whom rubs the point of his lance upon it, so to

unite the weapon with the skill and power inherent in the deceased,

and preserves the morsel as a permanent talisman.[314.5] Sometimes a

Tchuktchi, tired of life, is put to death by his kinsmen at his own

desire. All who take part in the ceremony bathe their faces and hands

in his blood. They then burn his body on a funeral pyre, {315}

standing around it and praying the departed not to forget them.[315.1]

A Dyak rite identifies the victim at the commemorative festival with

the deceased. The corpse is put into a temporary coffin for

preliminary burial until the _Tiwah_, or Feast of the Dead, can be

held. On that occasion a slave, or prisoner of war, is provided and

dressed in the usual clothing of the deceased. Thus clad, the victim

is wounded by all the assembled guests and finally killed. The

priestesses in attendance then daub the relations of the deceased with

the victim’s blood, “so to reconcile them with the departed and to

give them to understand that they have now fulfilled their obligation

towards his wandering soul.” After a night of debauchery the remains

of the dead man and the victim are placed in one permanent coffin, in

the family dead-house; but the victim’s skull is ranged with others

outside.[315.2] The details of this ceremony are unmistakable, though

it is right to say that the victim is now regarded simply as an

attendant on the departed in the other world.

Other means are also adopted. Among the Andaman Islanders, over a

large part of the Southern Ocean, in various districts of America, and

perhaps among the Wahuma of East Africa, certain of the bones, either

whole or calcined, are worn. Naturally the widow is, above everybody,

expected to do this. Among the Mosquitos of Central America and the

tribes of Honduras the widow took up the bones after burial for a year

and carried them for another year, sleeping with them at night. Not

until she had ceased to do this was she permitted to marry

again.[315.3] In {316} Australia the Kulin widow seems to have carried

the head and arms of her husband for an indefinite time, if not for

the rest of her life.[316.1] Among the Kurnai the mummified corpse was

carried about by the family in its migrations for years under special

charge of the parents, the wife or other near relatives, and finally,

after it was buried or stowed away in a hollow tree, the father or

mother, if living, would carry the lower jaw “as a memento.”[316.2]

The Kiriwina widow in New Guinea hangs from her neck her husband’s

lower jaw richly ornamented with glass and shell beads.[316.3] The

Mincopie widow is said to wear the entire skull.[316.4] Among the

natives of the western districts of Victoria the widow of a chief by

his first marriage wears a bag containing some of his calcined bones

for two years, or until she marries again; and she also gets the lower

bones of the right arm entire, which are carried in an opossum skin

for the same period. Conversely, a widower wears his wife’s calcined

bones in a bag of opossum-skin for twelve moons, and then buries

them.[316.5] The Taw-wa-tins and Tacullies of British Columbia, and

the Tolkotins of Oregon, compel a widow to wear her husband’s calcined

bones for three years, during which time her life is made a burden to

her by his kindred, so that widows marrying again have been known to

commit suicide rather than undergo the suffering a second time.[316.6]

{317} In many cases the bones are permanently worn by the relatives of

the deceased: in other cases, only for a time. Sometimes they are

expressly recognised as charms; but always they seem to be something

more than mere memorials of the dead.[317.1]

The skull and various other bones are yet more frequently kept in the

dwelling.[317.2] The instances to which {318} reference is given in

the note are, with the exceptions of the Issedones in antiquity and

the Krumen of the Grain Coast and the Andaman Islanders among modern

savages, confined to the islanders of the Pacific Ocean, and certain

tribes of North America, Honduras, and the northern parts of South

America. Where the circumstances permit, as in the case of the

Ichthyophagi and other ancient Ethiopian tribes, the old Egyptians,

the Chinese, the Solomon Islanders, the Banks’ Islanders, the

islanders of Ambrym in the New Hebrides, and the Yorubas of the Slave

Coast, the corpse is kept either permanently, or for a lengthened

period in the house unburied.[318.1] And after burning, the ashes are

similarly kept by several of the aboriginal peoples of Bengal and

Assam, until the time arrives when they can be solemnly committed to

the river or put into the family grave.[318.2] The Wakonda burn the

corpse; and the ashes, collected into a jar are preserved by the

family.[318.3] Along the Skeena River in British Columbia the natives

cremated their dead, and sometimes hung the ashes in boxes to the

family totem-pole.[318.4] Like certain Tibetan tribes, and perhaps

{319} the Issedones, some of the native Australians used the skull for

a drinking-cup.[319.1]

A custom more widely spread than that of keeping the bones, because

attended with much less inconvenience, is that of taking and keeping

some of the hair, nails or pieces of garments of the dead. It may,

indeed, be said to prevail through the greater part of the world; nor

has the custom of preserving a lock of hair cut after death as a

memorial of the departed yet vanished from among ourselves. An acute

writer in the _Contemporary Review_ some years ago related that in the

West Indian island of St. Croix those who washed the dead prior to

burial always took a lock of hair, a garment, or at least a fragment

of a garment, in order to prevent the spirit from molesting them for

venturing to tamper with the place of its late habitation. And he

adds: “At first thought, it seems most natural to believe that the

surest way to prevent any visit from a dead man is to take nothing of

his with you. But not so. A liberty has been taken with his body by

one who is probably a total stranger, hired perhaps for the express

purpose of preparing him for his coffin. Now, if you take something of

his, something that is either a part of him, or has been on his

person, you in a sense identify yourself with him; you establish as it

were, a kind of relationship, and thus the liberty you take with him

must seem much less to him.”[319.2] The reader who has followed the

argument of {320} the preceding paragraphs and the preceding chapters

will have no difficulty in admitting that here the true theory has

been touched. The motive that prompts an English mother to wear in a

brooch a lock of hair and the likeness of the darling she will see no

more on earth is the same as induces a Friendly Islander to pass a

braid of the hair of his dead kinsman through his own ear, and to wear

it there for the rest of his life. It is the same as leads a Mosquito

widow to carry about her husband’s bones and to sleep with them.

Consciously or unconsciously, the idea at the root of these and

similar practices is that of sacramental communion with the dead. In

the West Indian Negro practice just cited we see the application of

this idea to the protection of the person who may perchance have

incurred the wrath of the dead. Thus applied, it is analogous to that

of counteracting witchcraft by uniting the witch in blood-brotherhood

with her victim.

Hitherto we have only considered methods of effecting communion with

the dead based on the appropriation by the living of some part of the

corpse. This, however, implies the reciprocal possibility of communion

formed by means of a gift of some portion of the living body to the

{321} dead. Nothing more nor less I take to be the real meaning of the

practice, forbidden to the Hebrews, of cutting oneself for the

dead.[321.1] We find this practice in its most complete form among the

Orang Sakei, a people whose chief seats are about the river Siak on

the eastern side of Sumatra. There, at a funeral the kindred, making a

cross-cut with a knife on their heads, drop the blood on the face of

the corpse. Individuals are found who by repetition of this mutilation

have lost all the hair from their heads.[321.2] They have indeed, in

the words of the Deuteronomist, made a baldness between their eyes for

the dead. At Tahiti, in Captain Cook’s time, mourners were in the

habit of wounding themselves with knives and clubs consisting of canes

or pieces of wood set with sharks’ teeth, and allowing the blood and

tears to drip on small cloths which they threw under the bier. As

described by Mr. Ellis, some half century later, the performance was a

little different. Both sexes cut themselves. The females wore short

aprons of a special kind of cloth, which they held up to catch the

blood until it almost saturated them. The aprons were then dried in

the sun and given to the nearest surviving relatives as proofs of the

affection of the donors, and were preserved by the bereaved family as

tokens of the esteem in which the departed had been held.[321.3] It is

easy to see that this may have been a modification of the rite as it

prevailed in Captain Cook’s day, and that both may have been derived

from a rite similar to that of the Orang Sakei. In Australia the rite

is found both in its original and its {322} degraded forms. When the

body is placed in the ground the practice of several tribes is that

the mourners leap into the grave in turn, and are there cut on the

head with a boomerang, so as to allow the blood to fall over the

corpse. Among the tribes of the Murray river, the kindred of the

deceased, assembled round the corpse, or at all events in its

presence, used to lacerate their thighs, backs and breasts with shells

or flints until the blood flowed in streams. After burial the women

visited the grave at stated intervals, by night or in the early

morning, there to renew their wailings and lacerations. With other

tribes it is enough for the mourners to gash themselves, or be gashed

by others, in sign of grief: the process of ceremonial decay has

caused the need of bringing the blood into contact with the body of

the deceased to be no longer recognised.[322.1] The Mosquito Indians

lacerate and bruise themselves until they bleed in the dead man’s

hut.[322.2] The Bororó women in Central Brazil, at the festival for a

dead man, cause their limbs to be scratched until the blood flows, and

allow it to drip into the basket containing the bones.[322.3] Four

aborigines executed for murder at Helena, on the head waters of the

Missouri, in December 1890, were mourned by two squaws. One of the

squaws cut off two of her fingers and threw them into the grave. The

other gashed her face. Both caused the blood to flow into the grave,

and had previously scalped their children.[322.4] In another case

{323} of which a traveller in the early part of the present century

was a witness, the mourners’ blood was made to flow over the dead man

and over the food that was buried with him. But, though we have

sufficient testimony to the archaic form of the custom among the North

American peoples, that form is far from universal. More usually they

are content with simply wounding themselves, careless where the blood

may fall.[323.1] On the occasion of a burial among the Battas the

wives of the dead not only weep and howl, but scratch their faces and

bodies until the torn skin hangs down in places, and the blood streams

on the earth.[323.2] When an Abyssinian corpse is about to be removed

to its final resting-place some of the mourners “frantically grasp the

bier, as if wishing to retain it by force; others, convulsed by the

throes of agony and despair, rend their clothes, tear their hair,

lacerate their faces and necks with their nails, so that the blood

trickles down in streams.”[323.3] The Abyssinians call themselves

Christians; but in this respect they have hardly advanced beyond many

benighted pagans, like those already mentioned, or like the

Gallinomero of California who burnt the bodies of their dead, and

howled and wounded themselves the while in a manner, we are told, too

terrible for description.[323.4]

Nor is mere cutting and wounding all. Many savages deem it necessary

to inflict permanent mutilations on themselves, like the squaws of

Montana just mentioned. Among {324} the Fiji Islanders, when a king

died, each of the women cut off a finger-joint. These were hung upon

the eaves of the royal house. The amputation of a finger-joint was a

common sign of mourning; and poor people made a business of it,

receiving payment from the relatives of the dead in exchange for their

severed members.[324.1] In numerous cases of mutilation, as of

laceration, however, the evidence is wanting that the amputated

member, like the blood, was brought into contact or proximity with the

corpse. In such the rite is probably in a decayed form. The mere

wounding or amputation had come to be looked upon as enough. With

regard especially to amputation the process is clear. As the totem

developed into a god the idea of sacrifice evolved in like measure

from sacramental communion into a gift, a present to propitiate an

offended being, a substitute for the votary himself who had deserved

death, or (as in the instance of Admetos) whom the divinity was

calling out of life. To save themselves from death, or from calamity,

men offered up something of less value than their own lives, or than

that whose loss or injury they dreaded, but still something of value

and importance. Thus, as Dr. Tylor recalls, mothers in the southern

provinces of India will cut off their own fingers as sacrifices lest

they lose their children; and golden fingers are sometimes

offered--“the substitute of a substitute.”[324.2] At length a virtue

is attached to the mere abnegation. To deprive oneself of what is held

dear, or what is essential to enjoyment, or even to life, is in itself

of merit, {325} quite apart from any thought of benefiting the deity.

The shedding of blood, or the amputation of a finger, for the purpose

of communion with the dead would follow a parallel course, and would

gradually acquire virtue alone as a means of testifying to the

affection and the grief of the survivor, without bringing the survivor

into ritual union with the departed.

In the closest connection with wounding and mutilation for the dead,

is the cutting, tearing or shaving of the hair. We have already

studied gifts of hair to the dead; and if our conclusions as to them

be correct, we must also conclude that the cutting or tearing of the

hair as an expression of mourning is a relic of that custom which led

Hecuba to lay her grey locks upon Hector’s grave and Achilles to

bestrew the body of Patroklos with his shorn tresses. Dr. Wilken

contends that the intention alike of wounding, of mutilation and of

the gift of hair is the dedication of oneself to the dead, a

consecration of the entire person, a pledge of ultimate reunion. That

it is so in some cases seems clear. But this dedication must in a far

greater number of instances be made repeatedly to quite different

personages who have stood during life in a variety of relations to the

mourner. Where only wives devote their hair to their dead husbands and

are not allowed to marry a second time, things would arrange

themselves easily in the next world. But if they shed their blood, or

shear their locks also for fathers and brothers, for kindred and

friends all round--nay, perhaps for another husband or two,--then one

would imagine that even savages might anticipate awkward contingencies

yonder. The truth is that the practice has sprung from a lower plane

of culture than is supposed in a theory of self-dedication and {326}

future reunion. We know little of the belief in a future life

entertained by the Tasmanian aborigines. From what little we do know

it is safe to say that the Tasmanian woman who threw her hair upon the

grave of her mother or her child, had no thought of self-consecration

to the dead or of meeting again in another world. But she cherished

the belief that by means of her hair she could still be in some sort

of union with one she had loved. In short, the radical idea of all the

practices we have discussed in the present chapter is the same,

however much it may be modified with rising civilisation and the

gradual evolution of the conception of deity and spirit and the life

after death. It is grounded in the conviction of the continued, though

mysterious, oneness of a body with its severed parts, and the absence

of any conception of spirit apart from a visible and tangible material

existence.

Other funeral rites point in the same direction. We will confine our

attention to one. The custom of burial in a common grave or at least

in one general cemetery, is very widespread. It is found in all

quarters of the globe. The reason is given by Sir Richard Burton in

describing the practices in Sindh. “They believe that by interring

corpses close to the dust of their forefathers, the _ruha_, or souls

of the departed, will meet and commune together after death.”[326.1]

This is a belief that could not have arisen, save at a time when no

sharp division had been drawn between body and spirit. Mr. Crawfurd

says: “When a Javanese peasant claims to be allowed to cultivate the

fields occupied by his forefathers, his chief argument always is that

near them are the tombs of his progenitors. A Javanese, as I have

remarked in another place, cannot endure to be removed {327} from

these objects of his reverence and affection: and when he is taken ill

at a distance, begs to be carried home, at all the hazards of the

journey, that he may ‘sleep with his fathers.’ The bodies of some of

the princes who died in banishment at Ceylon, I perceive, were, at

their dying request, conveyed to their native island.”[327.1] I need

not dwell on the practice itself of burying the kindred in one place.

It is well known, and even among ourselves is not destitute of force,

appealing as it does to our most sacred feelings. As little need I

dwell upon the belief underlying it. But some of the modes of giving

effect to it may detain us for a few moments.

Even if already buried in another place the Sindhi and their

neighbours, the Yusufzais of Afghanistan, will exhume the bones and

bring them home for a fresh burial.[327.2] So do the natives of the

Gold Coast, even though years have elapsed since the death.[327.3] Dr.

Brinton tells us that “the custom of common ossuaries for each gens

appears to have prevailed among the Lenâpe”; and he quotes Gabriel

Thomas as relating that “if a person of note dies very far away from

his place of residence, they will convey his bones home some

considerable time after, to be buried there.” The Nanticokes buried

their corpses for some months, and then, taking up the bones, they

cleaned them and deposited them in a common ossuary. When they removed

to another place these bones were carried with them.[327.4] Common

ossuaries were very usual among the North American tribes; and in the

Ohio mounds is evidence that the {328} custom dates back to a

considerable antiquity.[328.1] These are only a few of the examples

that might be given. It is thus by no means necessary that the entire

body should be buried in the common ground: the bones only were

sufficient. But sometimes it is not practicable to bury the whole

skeleton; nor is it necessary. If what is done to a detached portion

of the body be done to the whole, all that is necessary is to make a

selection. The bones usually chosen are those of the skull; the

reasons for the choice being probably those which determine the choice

of the skull as a keepsake, according to a custom considered a few

pages back. When the Samoans made war at a distance from their homes,

they brought back, in returning, the skulls of their dead to the

ancestral graves.[328.2] Among the villagers of the Wanyika, in the

highlands of Eastern Africa, the head is dug up some time after

interment and sent to the capital to be buried, for there was formerly

the general cemetery of the whole tribe, and there still its councils

are held.[328.3] It is the custom of the Greeks and the Orthodox

Albanians, as of the Bretons and other European peoples, to dig up the

bones after a certain period of burial, wash them in wine, and deposit

them in an ossuary. But, because the Albanians lead a migratory life,

a large proportion of the male population dies abroad. “The bones of

these wanderers are afterwards collected and sent home; or, at any

rate, a portion of them--a skull or a single bone--is brought back to

their native place.”[328.4] Among the {329} ancient Romans a bone of

such as died abroad or in war was sent home to the relatives for

burial. This usage was expressly recognised by a law of the Twelve

Tables which abolished in all other cases the pre-existing custom of

cutting out a bone in order to bury it when the rest of the body was

burnt.[329.1] At the cremation the hot ashes were extinguished in

wine, collected by the relatives and deposited in an urn in the

grave-chamber. At Kalna, near Calcutta, is a place called Samáj Bati,

where a bone of every deceased member of the family of the Rajah of

Bardwan is deposited.[329.2] Various tribes of Bengal, among which are

the Santals, Oraons and Garos, ultimately commit some of the burnt

fragments of bone to the river, where they are carried down by the

current to the far-off eastern land whence, if we may trust the

national traditions, their ancestors originally came, thus “uniting

the dead with the fathers.” Instances, we are told, have been known of

a Santal “son following up the traces of a wild beast which had

carried off his parent, and watching, without food or sleep, during

several days for an opportunity to kill the animal, and secure one of

his father’s bones to carry to the {330} river.”[330.1] The Khási of

Assam, on the other hand, place the ashes in the family

bone-receptacle; and it is worthy of note that those of husband and

wife are never placed in the same, because they belong to different

clans, and the ashes of the children are put in that of their mother.

Major Godwin-Austen says “that the collection of the bones into one

vault, as it may be termed, is done under the impression that the

souls of the departed may all mingle together again in one large

family without trouble or suffering. The idea of a member of a family

being a wanderer in the other world, cut off from, and unable to join,

the circle of the spirits of his own clan is most repugnant to the

feelings of a Khási or Sinteng.” Consequently great efforts are made

to recover, even after the lapse of many years, the calcined bones of

any member of the gens who may have died at a distance.[330.2] Some of

the Garos, neighbours of the Khási, seem to follow this custom, while

others put the ashes into the river like the Santals.[330.3] The

Bhumij of Bengal inter some of the unconsumed fragments of bone at the

foot of a tulsi-plant in the courtyard of the dead man’s house, and

the rest in the original cemetery of the family. “The theory is that

the bones should be taken to the village in which the ancestors of the

deceased had the status of _bhuinhárs_, or first clearers of the

soil; but this is not invariably acted up to, and the rule is held to

be sufficiently complied with if a man’s bones are buried in a village

where he or his ancestors have been settled for a tolerably long

time.”[330.4]

Dr. Henrici brought from the Little Popo region of West {331} Africa

to Berlin some Negroes, among whom was one who was a great favourite

in the explorer’s family. Unfortunately he died; and his brother, who

was with him, cut off, before burial, “a lock of hair and some

finger-nail of the dead man to send to his parents in Africa in proof

of his death.”[331.1] Not merely in proof of his death was this done,

as the newspaper reports; for here we have what is called “the Yoruba

custom of Ettá.” It is practised by the tribes of the Slave Coast.

When a man dies away from home the greatest exertions are made by his

family to obtain something belonging to him, to be buried with the

usual rites in his native place. Clippings of the hair and nails are

usually carried home by his companions, if he have any. But these do

not constitute an irreducible minimum; for if they cannot be obtained,

a portion of his clothing is, as we might expect from our study of

other superstitions, enough.[331.2] So among the Dyaks (who, it will

be remembered, have family mortuaries), if any one be murdered, eaten

by a crocodile, or suffer some such misfortune, so that his body

cannot be found, all his clothing obtainable is tied up in a bundle

and buried.[331.3] Similarly, if a Khási corpse cannot be recovered,

as would happen, for example, if he were drowned in one of the large

rivers in the plains, his kinsmen assemble on some prominent rock or

hill overlooking the low country. One of them, taking in his hand some

money-cowries, “and looking towards the site of the accident, shouts

out the name of the deceased and calls on him to return; his spirit

having been supposed to do so, they proceed to burn the cowries, which

are symbolical of his bones, and any clothes {332} of the deceased

they may possess.” The ashes are placed in the bone-depository.[332.1]

When a Chinaman dies in battle, or at a distance from home, and his

body cannot be obtained, an effigy of paper or wood is made, his soul

is summoned to enter it, and it is then buried by his family with all

the usual obsequies, as if it were his body.[332.2] In Samoa, if it

were impossible to recover the body, or at least (as we have seen) the

skull, there was still a method left of performing the all-important

rites for the dead. The relatives would go to the battle-field, or, if

the man had died at sea, to the shore, and, spreading a cloth or fine

mat, would watch until some reptile or insect crawled upon it. They

would then quickly enclose the creature, take up the mat and bury it

in the proper manner, as if they had the corpse.[332.3] The luckless

insect is, in fact, identified with the departed, in accordance with

the beliefs discussed in an earlier chapter.

Here, though the subject be far from exhausted, we may terminate our

inquiry concerning funeral ceremonies based on the conception of

sacramental union, on the one side with the survivors, on the other

side with the forefathers of the clan. They afford ample evidence that

death, as the most solemn and mysterious fact of our existence, has

exercised the thoughts of men from the remotest ages. When they arose

the idea of a soul or spirit, as distinct from its corporeal tenement,

had hardly yet been evolved. Reason, as well as feeling, could do no

otherwise than cling to the bodily relics of the dead. And still it

clings, even in the highest plane of culture. And still--whatever

hopes may linger in the recesses of the mind of reunion, in {333} some

brighter and more lasting state of being, with those whom we have

loved--we cannot but cherish the relics left to us of their bodily

presence and think of the departed as yet about us while we hold these

treasures; and there is consolation, albeit a dreary one, in the

expectation that when we can hold these treasures no longer, the dust

which has been dearest will be that which mingles with our own.