THE SOUL AND ITS DESTINY.
Universality of the belief in a soul and a future state
shown by the aboriginal tongues, by expressed opinions,
and by sepulchral rites.--The future world never a place
of rewards and punishments.--The house of the Sun the
heaven of the red man.--The terrestrial paradise and the
under-world.--Cupay.--Xibalba.--Mictlan.--Metempsychosis?--Belief
in a resurrection of the dead almost universal.
The missionary Charlevoix wrote several excellent works on America
toward the beginning of the last century, and he is often quoted by
later authors; but probably no one of his sayings has been thus honored
more frequently than this: "The belief the best established among our
Americans is that of the immortality of the soul."[233-1] The tremendous
stake that every one of us has on the truth of this dogma makes it quite
a satisfaction to be persuaded that no man is willing to live wholly
without it. Certainly exceptions are very rare, and most of those which
materialistic philosophers have taken such pains to collect, rest on
misunderstandings or superficial observation.
In the new world I know of only one well authenticated instance where
all notion of a future state appears to have been entirely wanting, and
this in quite a small clan, the Lower Pend d'Oreilles, of Oregon. This
people had no burial ceremonies, no notion of a life hereafter, no word
for soul, spiritual existence, or vital principle. They thought that
when they died, that was the last of them. The Catholic missionaries who
undertook the unpromising task of converting them to Christianity, were
at first obliged to depend upon the imperfect translations of half-breed
interpreters. These "made the idea of soul intelligible to their hearers
by telling them they had a gut which never rotted, and that this was
their living principle!" Yet even they were not destitute of religious
notions. No tribe was more addicted to the observance of charms, omens,
dreams, and guardian spirits, and they believed that illness and bad
luck generally were the effects of the anger of a fabulous old
woman.[234-1] The aborigines of the Californian peninsula were as near
beasts as men ever become. The missionaries likened them to "herds of
swine, who neither worshipped the true and only God, nor adored false
deities." Yet they must have had some vague notion of an
after.world[TN-12], for the writer who paints the darkest picture of
their condition remarks, "I saw them frequently putting shoes on the
feet of the dead, which seems to indicate that they entertain the idea
of a journey after death."[234-2]
Proof of Charlevoix's opinion may be derived from three independent
sources. The aboriginal languages may be examined for terms
corresponding to the word soul, the opinions of the Indians themselves
may be quoted, and the significance of sepulchral rites as indicative of
a belief in life after death may be determined.
The most satisfactory is the first of these. _We_ call the soul a ghost
or spirit, and often a shade. In these words, the _breath_ and the
_shadow_ are the sensuous perceptions transferred to represent the
immaterial object of our thought. Why the former was chosen, I have
already explained; and for the latter, that it is man's intangible
image, his constant companion, and is of a nature akin to darkness,
earth, and night, are sufficiently obvious reasons.
These same tropes recur in American languages in the same connection.
The New England tribes called the soul _chemung_, the shadow, and in
Quiche _natub_, in Eskimo _tarnak_, express both these ideas. In Mohawk
_atonritz_, the soul, is from _atonrion_, to breathe, and other examples
to the same purpose have already been given.[235-1]
Of course no one need demand that a strict immateriality be attached to
these words. Such a colorless negative abstraction never existed for
them, neither does it for us, though we delude ourselves into believing
that it does. The soul was to them the invisible man, material as ever,
but lost to the appreciation of the senses.
Nor let any one be astonished if its unity was doubted, and several
supposed to reside in one body. This is nothing more than a somewhat
gross form of a doctrine upheld by most creeds and most philosophies. It
seems the readiest solution of certain psychological enigmas, and may,
for aught we know, be an instinct of fact. The Rabbis taught a threefold
division--_nephesh_, the animal, _ruah_, the human, and _neshamah_, the
divine soul, which corresponds to that of Plato into _thumos_,
_epithumia_, and _nous_. And even Saint Paul seems to have recognized
such inherent plurality when he distinguishes between the bodily soul,
the intellectual soul, and the spiritual gift, in his Epistle to the
Romans. No such refinements of course as these are to be expected among
the red men; but it may be looked upon either as the rudiments of these
teachings, or as a gradual debasement of them to gross and material
expression, that an old and wide-spread notion was found among both
Iroquois and Algonkins, that man has two souls, one of a vegetative
character, which gives bodily life, and remains with the corpse after
death, until it is called to enter another body; another of more
ethereal texture, which in life can depart from the body in sleep or
trance, and wander over the world, and at death goes directly to the
land of Spirits.[236-1]
The Sioux extended it to Plato's number, and are said to have looked
forward to one going to a cold place, another to a warm and comfortable
country, while the third was to watch the body. Certainly a most
impartial distribution of rewards and punishments.[237-1] Some other
Dakota tribes shared their views on this point, but more commonly,
doubtless owing to the sacredness of the number, imagined _four_ souls,
with separate destinies, one to wander about the world, one to watch the
body, the third to hover around the village, and the highest to go to
the spirit land.[237-2] Even this number is multiplied by certain Oregon
tribes, who imagine one in every member; and by the Caribs of
Martinique, who, wherever they could detect a pulsation, located a
spirit, all subordinate, however, to a supreme one throned in the heart,
which alone would be transported to the skies at death.[237-3] For the
heart that so constantly sympathizes with our emotions and actions, is,
in most languages and most nations, regarded as the seat of life; and
when the priests of bloody religions tore out the heart of the victim
and offered it to the idol, it was an emblem of the life that was thus
torn from the field of this world and consecrated to the rulers of the
next.
Various motives impel the living to treat with respect the body from
which life has departed. Lowest of them is a superstitious dread of
death and the dead. The stoicism of the Indian, especially the northern
tribes, in the face of death, has often been the topic of poets, and has
often been interpreted to be a fearlessness of that event. This is by
no means true. Savages have an awful horror of death; it is to them the
worst of ills; and for this very reason was it that they thought to meet
it without flinching was the highest proof of courage. Everything
connected with the deceased was, in many tribes, shunned with
superstitious terror. His name was not mentioned, his property left
untouched, all reference to him was sedulously avoided. A Tupi tribe
used to hurry the body at once to the nearest water, and toss it in; the
Akanzas left it in the lodge and burned over it the dwelling and
contents; and the Algonkins carried it forth by a hole cut opposite the
door, and beat the walls with sticks to fright away the lingering ghost.
Burying places were always avoided, and every means taken to prevent the
departed spirits exercising a malicious influence on those remaining
behind.
These craven fears do but reveal the natural repugnance of the animal to
a cessation of existence, and arise from the instinct of
self-preservation essential to organic life. Other rites, undertaken
avowedly for the behoof of the soul, prove and illustrate a simple but
unshaken faith in its continued existence after the decay of the body.
None of these is more common or more natural than that which attributes
to the emancipated spirit the same wants that it felt while on earth,
and with loving foresight provides for their satisfaction. Clothing and
utensils of war and the chase were, in ancient times, uniformly placed
by the body, under the impression that they would be of service to the
departed in his new home. Some few tribes in the far west still retain
the custom, but most were soon ridiculed into its neglect, or were
forced to omit it by the violation of tombs practised by depraved whites
in hope of gain. To these harmless offerings the northern tribes often
added a dog slain on the grave; and doubtless the skeletons of these
animals in so many tombs in Mexico and Peru point to similar customs
there. It had no deeper meaning than to give a companion to the spirit
in its long and lonesome journey to the far off land of shades. The
peculiar appropriateness of the dog arose not only from the guardianship
it exerts during life, but further from the symbolic signification it so
often had as representative of the goddess of night and the grave.
Where a despotic form of government reduced the subject almost to the
level of a slave and elevated the ruler almost to that of a superior
being, not animals only, but men, women, and children were frequently
immolated at the tomb of the cacique. The territory embraced in our own
country was not without examples of this horrid custom. On the lower
Mississippi, the Natchez Indians brought it with them from Central
America in all its ghastliness. When a sun or chief died, one or several
of his wives and his highest officers were knocked on the head and
buried with him, and at such times the barbarous privilege was allowed
to any of the lowest caste to at once gain admittance to the highest by
the deliberate murder of their own children on the funeral pyre--a
privilege which respectable writers tell us human beings were found base
enough to take advantage of.[239-1]
Oviedo relates that in the province of Guataro, in Guatemala, an actual
rivalry prevailed among the people to be slain at the death of their
cacique, for they had been taught that only such as went with him would
ever find their way to the paradise of the departed.[240-1] Theirs was
therefore somewhat of a selfish motive, and only in certain parts of
Peru, where polygamy prevailed, and the rule was that only one wife was
to be sacrificed, does the deportment of husbands seem to have been so
creditable that their widows actually disputed one with another for the
pleasure of being buried alive with the dead body, and bearing their
spouse company to the other world.[240-2] Wives who have found few
parallels since the famous matron of Ephesus!
The fire built nightly on the grave was to light the spirit on his
journey. By a coincidence to be explained by the universal sacredness of
the number, both Algonkins and Mexicans maintained it for _four_ nights
consecutively. The former related the tradition that one of their
ancestors returned from the spirit land and informed their nation that
the journey thither consumed just _four_ days, and that collecting fuel
every night added much to the toil and fatigue the soul encountered, all
of which could be spared it by the relatives kindling nightly a fire on
the grave. Or as Longfellow has told it:--
"Four days is the spirit's journey
To the land of ghosts and shadows,
Four its lonely night encampments.
Therefore when the dead are buried,
Let a fire as night approaches
Four times on the grave be kindled,
That the soul upon its journey
May not grope about in darkness."
The same length of time, say the Navajos, does the departed soul wander
over a gloomy marsh ere it can discover the ladder leading to the world
below, where are the homes of the setting and the rising sun, a land of
luxuriant plenty, stocked with game and covered with corn. To that land,
say they, sink all lost seeds and germs which fall on the earth and do
not sprout. There below they take root, bud, and ripen their
fruit.[241-1]
After four days, once more, in the superstitions of the Greenland
Eskimos, does the soul, for that term after death confined in the body,
at last break from its prison-house and either rise in the sky to dance
in the aurora borealis or descend into the pleasant land beneath the
earth, according to the manner of death.[241-2]
That there are logical contradictions in this belief and these
ceremonies, that the fire is always in the same spot, that the weapons
and utensils are not carried away by the departed, and that the food
placed for his sustenance remains untouched, is very true. But those who
would therefore argue that they were not intended for the benefit of the
soul, and seek some more recondite meaning in them as "unconscious
emblems of struggling faith or expressions of inward emotions,"[242-1]
are led astray by the very simplicity of their real intention. Where is
the faith, where the science, that does not involve logical
contradictions just as gross as these? They are tolerable to us merely
because we are used to them. What value has the evidence of the senses
anywhere against a religious faith? None whatever. A stumbling block
though this be to the materialist, it is the universal truth, and as
such it is well to accept it as an experimental fact.
The preconceived opinions that saw in the meteorological myths of the
Indian, a conflict between the Spirit of Good and the Spirit of Evil,
have with like unconscious error falsified his doctrine of a future
life, and almost without an exception drawn it more or less in the
likeness of the Christian heaven, hell, and purgatory. Very faint traces
of any such belief except where derived from the missionaries are
visible in the New World. Nowhere was any well-defined doctrine that
moral turpitude was judged and punished in the next-world. No contrast
is discoverable between a place of torments and a realm of joy; at the
worst but a negative castigation awaited the liar, the coward, or the
niggard. The typical belief of the tribes of the United States was well
expressed in the reply of Esau Hajo, great medal chief and speaker for
the Creek nation in the National Council, to the question, Do the red
people believe in a future state of rewards and punishments? "We have an
opinion that those who have behaved well are taken under the care of
Esaugetuh Emissee, and assisted; and that those who have behaved ill
are left to shift for themselves; and that there is no other
punishment."[243-1]
Neither the delights of a heaven on the one hand, nor the terrors of a
hell on the other, were ever held out by priests or sages as an
incentive to well-doing, or a warning to the evil-disposed. Different
fates, indeed, awaited the departed souls, but these rarely, if ever,
were decided by their conduct while in the flesh, but by the manner of
death, the punctuality with which certain sepulchral rites were
fulfilled by relatives, or other similar arbitrary circumstance beyond
the power of the individual to control. This view, which I am well aware
is directly at variance with that of all previous writers, may be shown
to be that natural to the uncultivated intellect everywhere, and the
real interpretation of the creeds of America. Whether these arbitrary
circumstances were not construed to signify the decision of the Divine
Mind on the life of the man, is a deeper question, which there is no
means at hand to solve.
Those who have complained of the hopeless confusion of American
religions have but proven the insufficiency of their own means of
analyzing them. The uniformity which they display in so many points is
nowhere more fully illustrated than in the unanimity with which they all
point to the _sun_ as the land of the happy souls, the realm of the
blessed, the scene of the joyous hunting-grounds of the hereafter. Its
perennial glory, its comfortable warmth, its daily analogy to the life
of man, marked its abode as the pleasantest spot in the universe. It
matters not whether the eastern Algonkins pointed to the south, others
of their nation, with the Iroquois and Creeks, to the west, or many
tribes to the east, as the direction taken by the spirit; all these
myths but mean that its bourn is the home of the sun, which is perhaps
in the Orient whence he comes forth, in the Occident where he makes his
bed, or in the South whither he retires in the chilling winter. Where
the sun lives, they informed the earliest foreign visitors, were the
villages of the deceased, and the milky way which nightly spans the arch
of heaven, was, in their opinion, the road that led thither, and was
called the path of the souls (_le chemin des ames_).[244-1] To _hueyu
ku_, the mansion of the sun, said the Caribs, the soul passes when death
overtakes the body.[244-2] Our knowledge is scanty of the doctrines
taught by the Incas concerning the soul, but this much we do know, that
they looked to the sun, their recognized lord and protector, as he who
would care for them at death, and admit them to his palaces. There--not,
indeed, exquisite joys--but a life of unruffled placidity, void of
labor, vacant of strong emotions, a sort of material Nirvana, awaited
them.[244-3] For these reasons, they, with most other American nations,
interred the corpse lying east and west, and not as the traveller Meyen
has suggested,[244-4] from the reminiscences of some ancient migration.
Beyond the Cordilleras, quite to the coast of Brazil, the innumerable
hordes who wandered through the sombre tropical forests of that immense
territory, also pointed to the west, to the region beyond the mountains,
as the land where the souls of their ancestors lived in undisturbed
serenity; or, in the more brilliant imaginations of the later
generations, in a state of perennial inebriety, surrounded by infinite
casks of rum, and with no white man to dole it out to them.[245-1] The
natives of the extreme south, of the Pampas and Patagonia, suppose the
stars are the souls of the departed. At night they wander about the sky,
but the moment the sun rises they hasten to the cheerful light, and are
seen no more until it disappears in the west. So the Eskimo of the
distant north, in the long winter nights when the aurora bridges the sky
with its changing hues and arrowy shafts of light, believes he sees the
spirits of his ancestors clothed in celestial raiment, disporting
themselves in the absence of the sun, and calls the phenomenon _the
dance of the dead_.
The home of the sun was the heaven of the red man; but to this joyous
abode not every one without distinction, no miscellaneous crowd, could
gain admittance. The conditions were as various as the national
temperaments. As the fierce gods of the Northmen would admit no soul to
the banquets of Walhalla but such as had met the "spear-death" in the
bloody play of war, and shut out pitilessly all those who feebly
breathed their last in the "straw death" on the couch of sickness, so
the warlike Aztec race in Nicaragua held that the shades of those who
died in their beds went downward and to naught; but of those who fell
in battle for their country to the east, "to the place whence comes the
sun."[246-1] In ancient Mexico not only the warriors who were thus
sacrificed on the altar of their country, but with a delicate and
poetical sense of justice that speaks well for the refinement of the
race, also those women who perished in child-birth, were admitted to the
home of the sun. For are not they also heroines in the battle of life?
Are they not also its victims? And do they not lay down their lives for
country and kindred? Every morning, it was imagined, the heroes came
forth in battle array, and with shout and song and the ring of weapons,
accompanied the sun to the zenith, where at every noon the souls of the
mothers, the Cihuapipilti, received him with dances, music, and flowers,
and bore him company to his western couch.[246-2] Except these,
none--without, it may be, the victims sacrificed to the gods, and this
is doubtful--were deemed worthy of the highest heaven.
A mild and unwarlike tribe of Guatemala, on the other hand, were
persuaded that to die by any other than a natural death was to forfeit
all hope of life hereafter, and therefore left the bodies of the slain
to the beasts and vultures.
The Mexicans had another place of happiness for departed souls, not
promising perpetual life as the home of the sun, but unalloyed pleasure
for a certain term of years. This was Tlalocan, the realm of the god of
rains and waters, the terrestrial paradise, whence flowed all the
rivers of the earth, and all the nourishment of the race. The diseases
of which persons died marked this destination. Such as were drowned, or
struck by lightning, or succumbed to humoral complaints, as dropsies and
leprosy, were by these tokens known to be chosen as the subjects of
Tlaloc. To such, said the natives, "death is the commencement of another
life, it is as waking from a dream, and the soul is no more human but
divine (_teot_)." Therefore they addressed their dying in terms like
these: "Sir, or lady, awake, awake; already does the dawn appear; even
now is the light approaching; already do the birds of yellow plumage
begin their songs to greet thee; already are the gayly-tinted
butterflies flitting around thee."[247-1]
Before proceeding to the more gloomy portion of the subject, to the
destiny of those souls who were not chosen for the better part, I must
advert to a curious coincidence in the religious reveries of many
nations which finds its explanation in the belief that the house of the
sun is the home of the blessed, and proves that this was the first
conception of most natural religions. It is seen in the events and
obstacles of the journey to the happy land. We everywhere hear of a
water which the soul must cross, and an opponent, either a dog or an
evil spirit, which it has to contend with. We are all familiar with the
dog Cerberus (called by Homer simply "the dog"), which disputed the
passage of the river Styx over which the souls must cross; and with the
custom of the vikings, to be buried in a boat so that they might cross
the waters of Ginunga-gap to the inviting strands of Godheim. Relics of
this belief are found in the Koran which describes the bridge _el
Sirat_, thin as a hair and sharp as a scimetar,[TN-13] stretched in a
single span from heaven to earth; in the Persian legend, where the
rainbow arch Chinevad is flung across the gloomy depths between this
world and the home of the happy; and even in the current Christian
allegory which represents the waters of the mythical Jordan rolling
between us and the Celestial City.
How strange at first sight does it seem that the Hurons and Iroquois
should have told the earliest missionaries that after death the soul
must cross a deep and swift river on a bridge formed by a single slender
tree most lightly supported, where it had to defend itself against the
attacks of a dog?[248-1] If only they had expressed this belief, it
might have passed for a coincidence merely. But the Athapascas
(Chepewyans) also told of a great water, which the soul must cross in a
stone canoe; the Algonkins and Dakotas, of a stream bridged by an
enormous snake, or a narrow and precipitous rock, and the Araucanians of
Chili of a sea in the west, in crossing which the soul was required to
pay toll to a malicious old woman. Were it unluckily impecunious, she
deprived it of an eye.[248-2] With the Aztecs this water was called
Chicunoapa, the Nine Rivers. It was guarded by a dog and a green dragon,
to conciliate which the dead were furnished with slips of paper by way
of toll. The Greenland Eskimos thought that the waters roared through
an unfathomable abyss over which there was no other bridge than a wheel
slippery with ice, forever revolving with fearful rapidity, or a path
narrow as a cord with nothing to hold on by. On the other side sits a
horrid old woman gnashing her teeth and tearing her hair with rage. As
each soul approaches she burns a feather under its nose; if it faints
she seizes it for her prisoner, but if the soul's guardian spirit can
overcome her, it passes through in safety.[249-1]
The similarity to the passage of the soul across the Styx, and the toll
of the obolus to Charon is in the Aztec legend still more striking, when
we remember that the Styx was the ninth head of Oceanus (omitting the
Cocytus, often a branch of the Styx). The Nine Rivers probably refer to
the nine Lords of the Night, ancient Aztec deities guarding the
nocturnal hours, and introduced into their calendar. The Tupis and
Caribs, the Mayas and Creeks, entertained very similar expectations.
We are to seek the explanation of these wide-spread theories of the
soul's journey in the equally prevalent tenet that the sun is its
destination, and that that luminary has his abode beyond the ocean
stream, which in all primitive geographies rolls its waves around the
habitable land. This ocean stream is the water which all have to attempt
to pass, and woe to him whom the spirit of the waters, represented
either as the old woman, the dragon, or the dog of Hecate, seizes and
overcomes. In the lush fancy of the Orient, the spirit of the waters
becomes the spirit of evil, the ocean stream the abyss of hell, and
those who fail in the passage the damned, who are foredoomed to evil
deeds and endless torture.
No such ethical bearing as this was ever assigned the myth by the red
race before they were taught by Europeans. Father Brebeuf could only
find that the souls of suicides and those killed in war were supposed to
live apart from the others; "but as to the souls of scoundrels," he
adds, "so far from being shut out, they are the welcome guests, though
for that matter if it were not so, their paradise would be a total
desert, as Huron and scoundrel (_Huron et larron_) are one and the
same."[250-1] When the Minnetarees told Major Long and the Mannicicas of
the La Plata the Jesuits,[250-2] that the souls of the bad fell into the
waters and were swept away, these are, beyond doubt, attributable either
to a false interpretation, or to Christian instruction. No such
distinction is probable among savages. The Brazilian natives divided the
dead into classes, supposing that the drowned, those killed by violence,
and those yielding to disease, lived in separate regions; but no ethical
reason whatever seems to have been connected with this.[250-3] If the
conception of a place of moral retribution was known at all to the race,
it should be found easily recognizable in Mexico, Yucatan, or Peru. But
the so-called "hells" of their religions have no such significance, and
the spirits of evil, who were identified by early writers with Satan, no
more deserve the name than does the Greek Pluto.
Cupay or Supay, the Shadow, in Peru was supposed to rule the land of
shades in the centre of the earth. To him went all souls not destined to
be the companions of the Sun. This is all we know of his attributes; and
the assertion of Garcilasso de la Vega, that he was the analogue of the
Christian Devil, and that his name was never pronounced without spitting
and muttering a curse on his head, may be invalidated by the testimony
of an earlier and better authority on the religion of Peru, who calls
him the god of rains, and adds that the famous Inca, Huayna Capac, was
his high priest.[251-1]
"The devil," says Cogolludo of the Mayas, "is called by them
Xibilha,[TN-14] which means he who disappears or vanishes."[251-2] In the
legends of the Quiches, the name Xibalba is given as that of the
under-world ruled by the grim lords One Death and Seven Deaths. The
derivation of the name is from a root meaning to fear, from which comes
the term in Maya dialects for a ghost or phantom.[251-3] Under the
influence of a century of Christian catechizing, the Quiche legends
portray this really as a place of torment, and its rulers as malignant
and powerful; but as I have before pointed out, they do so, protesting
that such was not the ancient belief, and they let fall no word that
shows that it was regarded as the destination of the morally bad. The
original meaning of the name given by Cogolludo points unmistakably to
the simple fact of disappearance from among men, and corresponds in
harmlessness to the true sense of those words of fear, Scheol, Hades,
Hell, all signifying hidden from sight, and only endowed with more grim
associations by the imaginations of later generations.[252-1]
Mictlanteuctli, Lord of Mictlan, from a word meaning to die, was the
Mexican Pluto. Like Cupay, he dwelt in the subterranean regions, and his
palace was named Tlalxicco, the navel of the earth. Yet he was also
located in the far north, and that point of the compass and the north
wind were named after him. Those who descended to him were oppressed by
the darkness of his abode, but were subjected to no other trials; nor
were they sent thither as a punishment, but merely from having died of
diseases unfitting them for Tlalocan. Mictlanteuctli was said to be the
most powerful of the gods. For who is stronger than Death? And who dare
defy the Grave? As the skald lets Odin say to Bragi: "Our lot is
uncertain; even on the hosts of the gods gazes the gray Fenris
wolf."[252-2]
These various abodes to which the incorporeal man took flight were not
always his everlasting home. It will be remembered that where a
plurality of souls was believed, one of these, soon after death,
entered another body to recommence life on earth. Acting under this
persuasion, the Algonkin women who desired to become mothers, flocked to
the couch of those about to die, in hope that the vital principle, as it
passed from the body, would enter theirs, and fertilize their sterile
wombs; and when, among the Seminoles of Florida, a mother died in
childbirth, the infant was held over her face to receive her parting
spirit, and thus acquire strength and knowledge for its future
use.[253-1] So among the Tahkalis, the priest is accustomed to lay his
hand on the head of the nearest relative of the deceased, and to blow
into him the soul of the departed, which is supposed to come to life in
his next child.[253-2] Probably, with a reference to the current
tradition that ascribes the origin of man to the earth, and likens his
life to that of the plant, the Mexicans were accustomed to say that at
one time all men have been stones, and that at last they would all
return to stones;[253-3] and, acting literally on this conviction, they
interred with the bones of the dead a small green stone, which was
called the principle of life.
Whether any nations accepted the doctrine of metempsychosis, and thought
that "the souls of their grandams might haply inhabit a partridge," we
are without the means of knowing. La Hontan denies it positively of the
Algonkins; but the natives of Popoyan refused to kill doves, says
Coreal,[254-1] because they believe them inspired by the souls of the
departed. And Father Ignatius Chome relates that he heard a woman of the
Chiriquanes in Buenos Ayres say of a fox: "May that not be the spirit of
my dead daughter?"[254-2] But before accepting such testimony as
decisive, we must first inquire whether these tribes believed in a
multiplicity of souls, whether these animals had a symbolical value, and
if not, whether the soul was not simply presumed to put on this shape in
its journey to the land of the hereafter: inquiries which are
unanswered. Leaving, therefore, the question open, whether the sage of
Samos had any disciples in the new world, another and more fruitful
topic is presented by their well-ascertained notions of the resurrection
of the dead.
This seemingly extraordinary doctrine, which some have asserted was
entirely unknown and impossible to the American Indians,[254-3] was in
fact one of their most deeply-rooted and wide-spread convictions,
especially among the tribes of the eastern United States. It is
indissolubly connected with their highest theories of a future life,
their burial ceremonies, and their modes of expression. The Moravian
Brethren give the grounds of this belief with great clearness: "That
they hold the soul to be immortal, and perhaps think the body will rise
again, they give not unclearly to understand when they say, 'We Indians
shall not for ever die; even the grains of corn we put under the earth,
grow up and become living things.' They conceive that when the soul has
been a while with God, it can, if it chooses, return to earth and be
born again."[255-1] This is the highest and typical creed of the
aborigines. But instead of simply being born again in the ordinary sense
of the word, they thought the soul would return to the bones, that these
would clothe themselves with flesh, and that the man would rejoin his
tribe. That this was the real, though often doubtless the dimly
understood reason of the custom of preserving the bones of the deceased,
can be shown by various arguments.
This practice was almost universal. East of the Mississippi nearly every
nation was accustomed, at stated periods--usually once in eight or ten
years--to collect and clean the osseous remains of those of its number
who had died in the intervening time, and inter them in one common
sepulchre, lined with choice furs, and marked with a mound of wood,
stone, and earth. Such is the origin of those immense tumuli filled with
the mortal remains of nations and generations which the antiquary, with
irreverent curiosity, so frequently chances upon in all portions of our
territory. Throughout Central America the same usage obtained in various
localities, as early writers and existing monuments abundantly testify.
Instead of interring the bones, were they those of some distinguished
chieftain, they were deposited in the temples or the council-houses,
usually in small chests of canes or splints. Such were the
charnel-houses which the historians of De Soto's expedition so often
mention, and these are the "arks" which Adair and other authors, who
have sought to trace the descent of the Indians from the Jews, have
likened to that which the ancient Israelites bore with them on their
migrations. A widow among the Tahkalis was obliged to carry the bones of
her deceased husband wherever she went for four years, preserving them
in such a casket handsomely decorated with feathers.[256-1] The Caribs
of the mainland adopted the custom for all without exception. About a
year after death the bones were cleaned, bleached, painted, wrapped in
odorous balsams, placed in a wicker basket, and kept suspended from the
door of their dwellings.[256-2] When the quantity of these heirlooms
became burdensome, they were removed to some inaccessible cavern, and
stowed away with reverential care. Such was the cave Ataruipe, a visit
to which has been so eloquently described by Alexander von Humboldt in
his "Views of Nature."
So great was the filial respect for these remains by the Indians, that
on the Mississippi, in Peru, and elsewhere, no tyranny, no cruelty, so
embittered the indigenes against the white explorers as the sacrilegious
search for treasures perpetrated among the sepulchres of past
generations. Unable to understand the meaning of such deep feeling, so
foreign to the European who, without a second thought, turns a cemetery
into a public square, or seeds it down in wheat, the Jesuit missionaries
in Paraguay accuse the natives of worshipping the skeletons of their
forefathers,[257-1] and the English in Virginia repeated it of the
Powhatans.
The question has been debated and variously answered, whether the art of
mummification was known and practised in America. Without entering into
the discussion, it is certain that preservation of the corpse by a long
and thorough process of exsiccation over a slow fire was nothing
unusual, not only in Peru, Popoyan, the Carib countries, and Nicaragua,
but among many of the tribes north of the Gulf of Mexico, as I have
elsewhere shown.[257-2] The object was essentially the same as when the
bones alone were preserved; and in the case of rulers, the same homage
was often paid to their corpses as had been the just due of their living
bodies.
The opinion underlying all these customs was, that a part of the soul,
or one of the souls, dwelt in the bones; that these 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. Language illustrates this not unusual theory. The
Iroquois word for bone is _esken_--for soul, _atisken_, literally that
which is within the bone.[257-3] In an Athapascan dialect bone is
_yani_, soul _i-yune_.[257-4] The Hebrew Rabbis taught that in the bone
_lutz_, the coccyx, remained at death the germ of a second life, which,
at the proper time, would develop into the purified body, as the plant
from the seed.
But mythology and supersitions[TN-15] add more decisive testimony. One of
the Aztec legends of the origin of man was, that after one of the
destructions of the world the gods took counsel together how to renew
the species. It was decided that one of their number, Xolotl, should
descend to Mictlan, the realm of the dead, and bring thence a bone of
the perished race. The fragments of this they sprinkled with blood, and
on the fourth day it grew into a youth, the father of the present
race.[258-1] The profound mystical significance of this legend is
reflected in one told by the Quiches, in which the hero gods Hunahpu and
Xblanque succumb to the rulers of Xibalba, the darksome powers of death.
Their bodies are burned, but their bones are ground in a mill and thrown
in the waters, lest they should come to life. Even this precaution is
insufficient--"for these ashes did not go far; they sank to the bottom
of the stream, where, in the twinkling of an eye, they were changed into
handsome youths, and their very same features appeared anew. On the
fifth day they displayed themselves anew, and were seen in the water by
the people,"[258-2] whence they emerged to overcome and destroy the
powers of death and hell (Xibalba).
The strongest analogies to these myths are offered by the superstitious
rites of distant tribes. Some of the Tupis of Brazil were wont on the
death of a relative to dry and pulverize his bones and then mix them
with their food, a nauseous practice they defended by asserting that the
soul of the dead remained in the bones and lived again in the
living.[259-1] Even the lower animals were supposed to follow the same
law. Hardly any of the hunting tribes, 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. Mrs. Eastman observes
that even yet the Dakotas deem it an omen of ill luck in the hunt, if
the dogs gnaw the bones or a woman inadvertently steps over them; and
the Chipeway interpreter, John Tanner, speaks of the same fear among
that tribe. The Yurucares of Bolivia carried it 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.[259-2] The traveller on our 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 they offer for this custom gives the key
to the whole theory and practice of preserving the osseous relics of the
dead, as well human as brute. They say that, "the bones 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."[259-3] This explanation, which comes to us from
indisputable authority, sets forth in its true light the belief of the
red race in a resurrection. It is not possible to trace it out in the
subtleties with which theologians have surrounded it as a dogma. The
very attempt would be absurd. They never occurred to the Indian. He
thought that the soul now enjoying the delights of the happy hunting
grounds would some time return to the bones, take on flesh, and live
again. Such is precisely the much discussed statement that Garcilasso de
la Vega says he often heard from the native Peruvians. He adds that so
careful were they lest any of the body should be lost that they
preserved even the parings of their nails and clippings of the
hair.[260-1] In contradiction to this the writer Acosta has been quoted,
who says that the Peruvians embalmed their dead because they "had no
knowledge that the bodies should rise with the soul."[260-2] But,
rightly understood, this is a confirmation of La Vega's account. Acosta
means that the Christian doctrine of the body rising from the dust being
unknown to the Peruvians (which is perfectly true), they preserved the
body just as it was, so that the soul when it returned to earth, as all
expected, might not be at a loss for a house of flesh.
The notions thus entertained by the red race on the resurrection are
peculiar to it, and stand apart from those of any other. They did not
look for the second life to be either better or worse than the present
one; they regarded it neither as a reward nor a punishment to be sent
back to the world of the living; nor is there satisfactory evidence that
it was ever distinctly connected with a moral or physical theory of the
destiny of the universe, or even with their prevalent expectation of
recurrent epochs in the course of nature. It is true that a writer whose
personal veracity is above all doubt, Mr. Adam Hodgson, relates an
ancient tradition of the Choctaws, to the effect that the present world
will be consumed by a general conflagration, after which it will be
reformed pleasanter than it now is, and that then the spirits of the
dead will return to the bones in the bone mounds, flesh will knit
together their loose joints, and they shall again inhabit their ancient
territory.[261-1]
There was also a similar belief among the Eskimos. They said that in the
course of time the waters would overwhelm the land, purify it of the
blood of the dead, melt the icebergs, and wash away the steep rocks. A
wind would then drive off the waters, and the new land would be peopled
by reindeers and young seals. Then would He above blow once on the bones
of the men and twice on those of the women, whereupon they would at once
start into life, and lead thereafter a joyous existence.[261-2]
But though there is nothing in these narratives alien to the course of
thought in the native mind, yet as the date of the first is recent
(1820), as they are not supported (so far as I know) by similar
traditions elsewhere, and as they may have arisen from Christian
doctrines of a millennium, I leave them for future investigation.
What strikes us the most in this analysis of the opinions entertained by
the red race on a future life is the clear and positive hope of a
hereafter, in such strong contrast to the feeble and vague notions of
the ancient Israelites, Greeks, and Romans, and yet the entire inertness
of this hope in leading them to a purer moral life. It offers another
proof that the fulfilment of duty is in its nature nowise connected with
or derived from a consideration of ultimate personal consequences. It is
another evidence that the religious is wholly distinct from the moral
sentiment, and that the origin of ethics is not to be sought in
connection with the ideas of divinity and responsibility.
FOOTNOTES:
[233-1] _Journal Historique_, p. 351: Paris, 1740.
[234-1] _Rep. of the Commissioner of Ind. Affairs_, 1854, pp. 211, 212.
The old woman is once more a personification of the water and the moon.
[234-2] Baegert, _Acc. of the Aborig. Tribes of the Californian
Peninsula_, translated by Chas. Rau, in Ann. Rep. Smithson. Inst., 1866,
p. 387.
[235-1] Of the Nicaraguans Oviedo says: "Ce n'est pas leur coeur qui va
en haut, mais ce qui les faisait vivre; c'est-a-dire, le souffle qui leur
sort par la bouche, et que l'on nomme _Julio_" (_Hist. du Nicaragua_, p.
36). The word should be _yulia_, kindred with _yoli_, to live.
(Buschmann, _Uber die Aztekischen Ortsnamen_, p. 765.) In the Aztec and
cognate languages we have already seen that _ehecatl_ means both _wind_,
_soul_, and _shadow_ (Buschmann, _Spuren der Aztek. Spr. in Noerdlichen
Mexico_, p. 74).
[236-1] _Rel. de la Nouv. France_, An 1636, p. 104; "Keating's
_Narrative_," i. pp. 232, 410.
[237-1] French, _Hist. Colls. of Louisiana_, iii. p. 26.
[237-2] Mrs. Eastman, _Legends of the Sioux_, p. 129.
[237-3] _Voy. a la Louisiane fait en 1720_, p. 155: Paris, 1768.
[239-1] Dupratz, _Hist. of Louisiana_, ii. p. 219; Dumont, _Mems. Hist.
sur la Louisiane_, i. chap. 26.
[240-1] _Rel. de la Prov. de Cueba_, p. 140.
[240-2] Coreal, _Voiages aux Indes Occidentales_, ii. p. 94: Amsterdam,
1722.
[241-1] _Senate Rep. on the Ind. Tribes_, p. 358: Wash. 1867.
[241-2] Egede, _Nachrichten von Groenland_, p. 145.
[242-1] Alger, _Hist. of the Doctrine of a Future Life_, p. 76.
[243-1] Hawkins, _Sketch of the Creek Country_, p. 80.
[244-1] _Rel. de la Nouv. France_, 1634, pp. 17, 18.
[244-2] Mueller, _Amer. Urreligionen_, p. 229.
[244-3] La Vega, _Hist. des Incas._, lib. ii. cap. 7.
[244-4] _Ueber die Ureinwohner von Peru_, p. 41.
[245-1] Coreal, _Voy. aux Indes Occident._, i. p. 224; Mueller, _Amer.
Urrelig._, p. 289.
[246-1] Oviedo, _Hist. du Nicaragua_, p. 22.
[246-2] Torquemada, _Monarquia Indiana_, lib. vi. cap. 27.
[247-1] Sahagun, _Hist. de la Nueva Espana_, lib. x. cap. 29.
[248-1] _Rel. de la Nouv. France_, 1636, p. 105.
[248-2] Molina, _Hist. of Chili_, ii. p. 81, and others in Waitz,
_Anthropologie_, iii. p. 197.
[249-1] _Nachrichten von Groenland aus dem Tagebuche vom Bischof Paul
Egede_, p. 104: Kopenhagen, 1790.
[250-1] _Rel. de la Nouv. France_, 1636, p. 105.
[250-2] Long's _Expedition_, i. p. 280; Waitz, _Anthropologie_, iii. p.
531.
[250-3] Mueller, _Amer. Urreligionen_, p. 287.
[251-1] Compare Garcilasso de la Vega, _Hist. des Incas._, liv. ii. chap.
ii., with _Lett. sur les Superstitions du Perou_, p. 104. Cupay is
undoubtedly a personal form from _Cupan_, a shadow. (See Holguin, _Vocab.
de la Lengua Quichua_, p. 80: Cuzco, 1608.)
[251-2] "El que desparece o desvanece," _Hist. de Yucathan_, lib. iv.
cap. 7.
[251-3] Ximenes, _Vocab. Quiche_, p. 224. The attempt of the Abbe
Brasseur to make of Xibalba an ancient kingdom of renown with Palenque as
its capital, is so utterly unsupported and wildly hypothetical, as to
justify the humorous flings which have so often been cast at antiquaries.
[252-1] Scheol is from a Hebrew word, signifying to dig, to hide in the
earth. Hades signifies the _unseen_ world. Hell Jacob Grimm derives from
_hilan_, to conceal in the earth, and it is cognate with _hole_ and
_hollow_.
[252-2] Pennock, _Religion of the Northmen_, p. 148.
[253-1] La Hontan, _Voy. dans l'Am. Sept._, i. p. 232; _Narrative of
Oceola Nikkanoche_, p. 75.
[253-2] Morse, _Rep. on the Ind. Tribes_, App. p. 345.
[253-3] Garcia, _Or. de los Indios_, lib. iv. cap. 26, p. 310.
[254-1] _Voiages aux Indes Oc._, ii. p. 132.
[254-2] _Lettres Edif. et Cur._, v. p. 203.
[254-3] Alger, _Hist. of the Doctrine of a Future Life_, p. 72.
[255-1] Loskiel, _Ges. der Miss. der evang. Brueder_, p. 49.
[256-1] Richardson, _Arctic Expedition_, p. 260.
[256-2] Gumilla, _Hist. del Orinoco_, i. pp. 199, 202, 204.
[257-1] Ruis, _Conquista Espiritual del Paraguay_, p. 48, in Lafitau.
[257-2] _Notes on the Floridian Peninsula_, pp. 191 sqq.
[257-3] Bruyas, _Rad. Verborum Iroquaeorum_.
[257-4] Buschmann, _Athapask. Sprachstamm_, pp. 182, 188.
[258-1] Torquemada, _Monarquia Indiana_, lib. vi. cap. 41.
[258-2] _Le Livre Sacre des Quiches_, pp. 175-177.
[259-1] Mueller, _Amer. Urrelig._, p. 290, after Spix.
[259-2] D'Orbigny, _Annuaire des Voyages_, 1845, p. 77.
[259-3] Long's _Expedition_, i. p. 278.
[260-1] _Hist. des Incas_, lib. iii. chap. 7.
[260-2] _Hist. of the New World_, bk. v. chap. 7.
[261-1] _Travels in North America_, p. 280.
[261-2] Egede, _Nachrichten von Groenland_, p. 156.