The want of power of abstraction which has ever had such disastrous

effect on the beliefs of mankind, confounding myth and chronicle, and

crushing the spirit of history under the rubbish of literalized

tradition, comes very clearly into view in the study of parable. The

state of mind of the deaf, dumb, and blind Laura Bridgman, so

instructive in illustrating the mental habits of uneducated though

full-sensed men, displays in an extreme form the difficulty such men

have in comprehending the unreality of any story. She could not be made

to see that arithmetical problems were anything but statements of

concrete fact, and when her teacher asked her, ‘If you can buy a barrel

of cider for four dollars, how much can you buy for one dollar?’ she

replied quite simply, ‘I cannot give much for cider, because it is very

sour.’[604] It is a surprising instance of this tendency to concretism,

that among people so civilized as the Buddhists, the most obviously

moral beast-fables have become literal incidents of sacred history.

Gautama, during his 550 jatakas or births, took the form of a frog, a

fish, a crow, an ape, and various other animals, and so far were the

legends of these transformations from mere myth to his followers, that

there have been preserved as relics in Buddhist temples the hair,

feathers, and bones of the creatures whose bodies the great teacher

inhabited. Now among the incidents which happened to Buddha during his

series of animal births, he appeared as an actor in the familiar fable

of the Fox and the Stork, and it was he who, when he was a Squirrel, set

an example of parental virtue by trying to dry up the ocean with his

tail, to save his young ones whose nest had drifted out to sea, till his

persevering courage was rewarded by a miracle.[605] To our modern minds,

a moral which seems the very purpose of a story is evidence unfavourable

to its truth as fact. But if even apologues of talking birds and beasts

have not been safe from literal belief, it is clear that the most

evident moral can have been but slight protection to parables told of

possible and life-like men. It was not a needless precaution to state

explicitly of the New Testament parables that they were parables, and

even this guard has not availed entirely. Mrs. Jameson relates some

curious experience in the following passage:—‘I know that I was not very

young when I entertained no more doubt of the substantial existence of

Lazarus and Dives than of John the Baptist and Herod; when the Good

Samaritan was as real a personage as any of the Apostles; when I was

full of sincerest pity for those poor foolish Virgins who had forgotten

to trim their lamps, and thought them—in my secret soul—rather hardly

treated. This impression of the literal actual truth of the parables I

have since met with in many children, and in the uneducated but devout

hearers and readers of the Bible; and I remember that when I once tried

to explain to a good old woman the proper meaning of the word parable,

and that the story of the Prodigal Son was not a fact, she was

scandalized—she was quite sure that Jesus would never have told anything

to his disciples that was not true. Thus she settled the matter in her

own mind, and I thought it best to leave it there undisturbed.’[606]

Nor, it may be added, has such realization been confined to the minds of

the poor and ignorant. St. Lazarus, patron saint of lepers and their

hospitals, and from whom the _lazzarone_ and the _lazzaretto_ take their

name, obviously derives these qualities from the Lazarus of the parable.

The proof of the force and obstinacy of the mythic faculty, thus given

by the relapse of parable into pseudo-history, may conclude this

dissertation on mythology. In its course there have been examined the

processes of animating and personifying nature, the formation of legend

by exaggeration and perversion of fact, the stiffening of metaphor by

mistaken realization of words, the conversion of speculative theories

and still less substantial fictions into pretended traditional events,

the passage of myth into miracle-legend, the definition by name and

place given to any floating imagination, the adaptation of mythic

incident as moral example, and the incessant crystallization of story

into history. The investigation of these intricate and devious

operations has brought ever more and more broadly into view two

principles of mythologic science. The first is that legend, when

classified on a sufficient scale, displays a regularity of development

which the notion of motiveless fancy quite fails to account for, and

which must be attributed to laws of formation whereby every story, old

and new, has arisen from its definite origin and sufficient cause. So

uniform indeed is such development, that it becomes possible to treat

myth as an organic product of mankind at large, in which individual,

national, and even racial distinctions stand subordinate to universal

qualities of the human mind. The second principle concerns the relation

of myth to history. It is true that the search for mutilated and

mystified traditions of real events, which formed so main a part of old

mythological researches, seems to grow more hopeless the farther the

study of legend extends. Even the fragments of real chronicle found

embedded in the mythic structure are mostly in so corrupt a state, that,

far from their elucidating history, they need history to elucidate them.

Yet unconsciously, and as it were in spite of themselves, the shapers

and transmitters of poetic legend have preserved for us masses of sound

historical evidence. They moulded into mythic lives of gods and heroes

their own ancestral heirlooms of thought and word, they displayed in the

structure of their legends the operations of their own minds, they

placed on record the arts and manners, the philosophy and religion of

their own times, times of which formal history has often lost the very

memory. Myth is the history of its authors, not of its subjects; it

records the lives, not of superhuman heroes, but of poetic nations.

Footnote 500:

Hamilton in ‘As. Res.’ vol. ii. p. 344; Colebrooke, ibid. vol. iv. p.

385; Earl in ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. iii. p. 682; vol. iv. p. 9.

See Renaudot, ‘Travels of Two Mahommedans,’ in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p.

183.

Footnote 501:

F. Buckland, ‘Curiosities of Nat. Hist.’ 3rd series, vol. ii. p. 39.

Footnote 502:

Andrew Boorde, ‘Introduction of Knowledge,’ ed. by F. J. Furnivall,

Early Eng. Text Soc. 1870, p. 133.

Footnote 503:

Ælian, De Nat. Animal, v. 2, see 8.

Footnote 504:

Acta Sanctorum Bolland. Jan. xvi.

Footnote 505:

‘Acts of Peter and Paul,’ trans. by A. Walker, in Ante-Nicene Library,

vol. xvi. p. 257; F. F. Tuckett in ‘Nature,’ Oct. 20, 1870. See Lyell,

‘Principles of Geology,’ ch. xxx.; Phillips, ‘Vesuvius,’ p. 244.

Footnote 506:

Lane, ‘Thousand and One N.’ vol. i. pp. 161, 217; vol. iii. p. 78;

Hole, ‘Remarks on the Ar. N.’ p. 104; Heinrich von Veldeck, ‘Herzog

Ernst’s von Bayern Erhöhung, &c.’ ed. Rixner, Amberg, 1830, p. 65; see

Ludlow, ‘Popular Epics of Middle Ages,’ p. 221.

Footnote 507:

Sir John Maundevile, ‘Voiage and Travaile.’

Footnote 508:

Sir Thomas Browne, ‘Vulgar Errours,’ ii. 3.

Footnote 509:

‘Mémoires conc. l’Hist., &c., des Chinois,’ vol. iv. p. 457. Compare

the story of the magnetic (?) horseman in ‘Thousand and One N.’ vol.

iii. p. 119, with the old Chinese mention of magnetic cars with a

movable-armed pointing figure, A. v. Humboldt, ‘Asie Centrale,’ vol.

i. p. xl.; Goguet, vol. iii. p. 284. (The loadstone mountain has its

power from a turning brazen horseman on the top.)

Footnote 510:

Brasseur, ‘Popol Vuh,’ pp. 23-31. Compare this Central American myth

of the ancient senseless mannikins who become monkeys, with a

Pottowatomi legend in Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. p. 320.

Footnote 511:

Dos Santos, ‘Ethiopia Oriental,’ Evora, 1609, part i. chap. ix.;

Callaway, ‘Zulu Tales,’ vol. i. p. 177. See also Burton, ‘Footsteps in

E. Afr.’ p. 274; Waitz, ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. ii. p. 178 (W. Afr.).

Footnote 512:

D’Orbigny, ‘L’Homme Américain,’ vol. ii. p. 102.

Footnote 513:

Weil, ‘Bibl. Leg. der Muselmänner,’ p. 267; Lane, ‘Thousand and One

N.’ vol. iii. p. 350; Burton, ‘El Medinah, &c.’ vol. ii. p. 343.

Footnote 514:

Ovid, ‘Metamm.’ xiv. 89-100; Welcker, ‘Griechische Götterlehre,’ vol.

iii. p. 108.

Footnote 515:

Campbell in ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ 1866, part ii. p. 132; Latham,

‘Descr. Eth.’ vol. ii. p. 456; Tod, ‘Annals of Rajasthan,’ vol. i. p.

114.

Footnote 516:

Bourien in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 73; see ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’

vol. ii. p. 271.

Footnote 517:

Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. iii. p. 435; ‘Mensch,’ vol. iii. pp.

347, 349, 387, Koeppen, vol. ii. p. 44; J. J. Schmidt, ‘Völker

Mittel-Asiens,’ p. 210.

Footnote 518:

Froebel, ‘Central America,’ p. 220; see Bosman, ‘Guinea,’ in

Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 401. For other traditions of human descent

from apes, see Farrar, ‘Chapters on Language,’ p. 45.

Footnote 519:

Bosman, ‘Guinea,’ p. 440; Waitz, vol. ii. p. 178; Cauche, ‘Relation de

Madagascar,’ p. 127; Dobrizhoffer, ‘Abipones,’ vol. i. p. 288;

Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 44; Pouchet, ‘Plurality of Human Race,’

p. 22.

Footnote 520:

Monboddo, ‘Origin and Progress of Lang.’ 2nd ed. vol. i. p. 277; Du

Chaillu, ‘Equatorial Africa,’ p. 61; St. John, ‘Forests of Far East,’

vol. i. p. 17; vol. ii. p. 239.

Footnote 521:

Max Müller in Bunsen, ‘Phil. Univ. Hist.’ vol. i. p. 340; ‘Journ. As.

Soc. Bengal,’ vol. xxiv. p. 207. See Marsden in ‘As. Res.’ vol. iv. p.

226; Fitch in Pinkerton, vol. ix. p. 415; Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’

vol. i. p. 465; vol. ii. p. 201.

Footnote 522:

Ayeen Akbaree, trans. by Gladwin; ‘Report of Ethnological Committee

Jubbulpore Exhibition, 1866-7,’ part i. p. 3. See the mention of the

_ban-manush_ in ‘Kumaon and Nepal,’ Campbell; ‘Ethnology of India,’ in

‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ 1866, part ii. p. 46.

Footnote 523:

Marsden, ‘Sumatra,’ p. 41.

Footnote 524:

Logan in ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. i. p. 246; vol. iii. p. 490;

Thomson, ibid. vol. i. p. 350; Crawfurd, ibid. vol. iv. p. 186.

Footnote 525:

Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. i. p. 123; vol. iii. p. 435.

Footnote 526:

Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol. i. pp. 425, 471.

Footnote 527:

Its analogue is _bosjesbok_, ‘bush-goat,’ the African antelope. The

derivation of the _Bosjesman’s_ name from his nest-like shelter in a

bush, given by Kolben and others since, is newer and far-fetched.

Footnote 528:

Martius, vol. i. p. 50.

Footnote 529:

Humboldt and Bonpland, vol. v. p. 81; Southey, ‘Brazil,’ vol. i. p.

xxx.; Bates, ‘Amazons,’ vol. i. p. 73; vol. ii. p. 204.

Footnote 530:

Castelnau, ‘Exp. dans l’Amér. du Sud,’ vol. iii. p. 118. See Martius,

vol. i. pp. 248, 414, 563, 633.

Footnote 531:

Petherick, ‘Egypt, &c.’ p. 367.

Footnote 532:

Southey, ‘Brazil,’ vol. i. p. 685; Martius, vol. i. pp. 425, 633.

Footnote 533:

Krapf, p. 142; Baker, ‘Albert Nyanza,’ vol. i. p. 83; St. John, vol.

i. pp. 51, 405; and others.

Footnote 534:

Lockhart, ‘Abor. of China,’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 181.

Footnote 535:

‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. ii. p. 358; vol. iv. p. 374; Cameron,

‘Malayan India,’ p. 120; Marsden, p. 7; Antonio Galvano, pp. 120, 218.

Footnote 536:

Davis, ‘Carthage,’ p. 230; Bostock and Riley’s Pliny (Bohn’s ed.),

vol. ii. p. 134, note.

Footnote 537:

Francisque-Michel, ‘Races Maudites,’ vol. i. p. 17; ‘Argot,’ p. 349;

Fernan Caballero, ‘La Gaviota,’ vol. i. p. 59.

Footnote 538:

Horne Tooke, ‘Diversions of Purley,’ vol. i. p. 397.

Footnote 539:

Baring-Gould, ‘Myths,’ p. 137.

Footnote 540:

Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 252; Backhouse, ‘Austr.’ p. 557; Purchas,

vol. iv. p. 1290; De Laet, ‘Novus Orbis,’ p. 543.

Footnote 541:

For various other stories of tailed men, see ‘As. Res.’ vol. iii. p.

149; ‘Mem. Anthrop. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 454; ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol.

iii. p. 261, &c. (Nicobar Islands); Klemm, ‘C. G.’ vol. ii. pp. 246,

316 (Sarytschew Is.); ‘Letters of Columbus,’ Hakluyt Soc. p. 11

(Cuba), &c., &c.

Footnote 542:

Details of monstrous tribes have been in past centuries specially

collected in the following works: ‘Anthropometamorphosis: Man

Transformed, or the Artificiall Changeling, &c.,’ scripsit J. B.

cognomento Chirosophus, M.D., London, 1653; Calovius, ‘De

Thaumatanthropologia, vera pariter atque ficta tractatus

historico-physicus,’ Rostock, 1685; J. A. Fabricius, ‘Dissertatio de

hominibus orbis nostri incolis, &c.,’ Hamburg, 1721. Only a few

principal references are here given.

Footnote 543:

Grimm, ‘D. M.’ ch. xvii. xviii.; Nilsson, ‘Primitive Inhabitants of

Scandinavia,’ ch. vi.; Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ pp. 230, 325-7; Wuttke,

‘Volksabergl.’ p. 231.

Footnote 544:

‘Chronique de Tabari,’ tr. Dubeux, part i. ch. viii. See Koran, xviii.

92.

Footnote 545:

Pigafetta in Pinkerton, vol. xi. p. 314. See Blumenbach, ‘De Generis

Humanæ Varietate;’ Fitzroy, ‘Voy. of Adventure and Beagle,’ vol. i.;

Waitz, ‘Anthropologie,’ vol. iii. p. 488.

Footnote 546:

Knivet in Purchas, vol. iv. p. 1231; compare Humboldt and Bonpland,

vol. v. p. 564, with Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ p. 424; see also Krapf,

‘East Africa,’ p. 51; Du Chaillu, ‘Ashango-land,’ p. 319.

Footnote 547:

‘Early Hist. of Mankind,’ ch. xi.; Hunt, ‘Pop. Rom.’ 1st series, pp.

18, 304.

Footnote 548:

Squier, ‘Abor. Monuments of N. Y.’ p. 68; Long’s ‘Exp.’ vol. i. pp.

62, 275; Hersart de Villemarqué, ‘Chants Populaires de la Bretagne,’

p. liv., 35; Meadows Taylor in ‘Journ. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 157.

Footnote 549:

Gul. de Rubruquis in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 69; Lane, ‘Thousand and

One N.’ vol. iii. pp. 81, 91, see 24, 52, 97; Hole, p. 63; Marco Polo,

book iii. ch. xii.

Footnote 550:

Benjamin of Tudela, ‘Itinerary,’ ed. and tr. by Asher, 83; Plin. vii.

2. See Max Müller in Bunsen ‘Philos. Univ. Hist.,’ vol. i. pp. 346,

358.

Footnote 551:

Plin. iv. 27; Mela, iii. 6; Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. i. p. 120;

vol. ii. p. 93; St. John, vol. ii. p. 117; Marsden, p. 53; Lane,

‘Thousand and One N.’ vol. iii. pp. 92, 305; Petherick, ‘Egypt, &c.’

p. 367; Burton, ‘Central Afr.’ vol. i. p. 235; Pedro Simon, ‘Indias

Occidentales,’ p. 7.

Footnote 552:

Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol i. p. 133.

Footnote 553:

Marco Polo, book iii. ch. xviii.

Footnote 554:

Ælian, iv. 46; Plin. vi. 35; vii. 2. See for other versions, Purchas,

vol. iv. p. 1191; vol. v. p. 901; Cranz, p. 267; Lane, ‘Thousand and

One Nights,’ vol. iii. pp. 36, 94, 97, 305; Davis, ‘Carthage,’ p. 230;

Latham, ‘Descr. Eth.’ vol. ii. p. 83.

Footnote 555:

Plin. v. 8; vi. 24, 35; vii. 2; Mela, iii. 9; Herberstein in Hakluyt,

vol. i. p. 593; Latham, ‘Descr. Eth.’ vol. i. p. 483; Davis, l.c.; see

‘Early Hist. of Mankind,’ p. 77.

Footnote 556:

Plin. v. 8; Lane, vol. i. p. 33; vol. ii. p. 377; vol. iii. p. 81;

Eisenmenger, vol. ii. p. 559; Mandeville, p. 243; Raleigh in Hakluyt,

vol. iii. pp. 652, 665; Humboldt and Bonpland, vol. v. p. 176;

Purchas, vol. iv. p. 1285; vol. v. p. 901; Isidor. Hispal. s.v.

‘Acephali;’ Vambéry, p. 310, see p. 436.

Footnote 557:

Lane, vol. i. p. 33; Callaway, ‘Zulu Tales,’ vol. i. pp. 199, 202.

Virg. Æn. viii. 194; a similar metaphor is the name of the _Nimchas_,

from Persian nim—half, ‘Journ. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 192, cf. French

_demi-monde_. Compare the ‘one-legged’ tribes, Plin. vii. 2;

Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part iii. p. 521; Charlevoix, vol. i. p.

25. The Australians use the metaphor ‘of one leg’ (matta gyn) to

describe tribes as of one stock, G. F. Moore, ‘Vocab.’ pp. 5, 71.

Footnote 558:

Hayton in Purchas, vol. iii. p. 108; see Klemm, ‘C. G.’ vol. vi. p.

129; Vambéry, p. 49; Homer. Odyss. ix.; Strabo, i. 2, 12; see

Scherzer, ‘Voy. of Novara,’ vol. ii. p. 40; C. J. Andersson, ‘Lake

Ngami, &c.,’ p. 453; Du Chaillu, ‘Equatorial Africa,’ p. 440; Sir J.

Richardson, ‘Polar Regions,’ p. 300. For tribes with more than two

eyes, see Pliny’s metaphorically explained Nisacæthæ and Nisyti, Plin.

vi. 35; also Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 414; ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol.

i. pp. 25, 76; Petherick, l.c.; Bowen, ‘Yoruba Gr.’ p. xx.; Schirren,

p. 196.

Footnote 559:

Kölle, ‘Vei Gr.’ p. 229; Strabo, i. 2, 35. The artificially elongated

skulls of real Μακροκέφαλοι (Hippokrates, ‘De Aeris,’ 14.) are found

in the burial-places of Kertch.

Footnote 560:

Plin., vii. 2.; Humboldt and Bonpland, vol. v. p. 81.

Footnote 561:

Krapf, p. 359.

Footnote 562:

Southey, ‘Brazil,’ vol. iii. p. 390.

Footnote 563:

D. Wilson, ‘Archæology, &c. of Scotland,’ p. 123.

Footnote 564:

Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. i. p. 128; Livingstone, p. 532.

Footnote 565:

Williams, ‘Fiji,’ p. 160; Seemann, ‘Viti,’ p. 113; Turner,

‘Polynesia,’ p. 182 (a similar legend told by the Samoans). Another

tattooing legend in Latham, ‘Descr. Eth.’ vol. i. p. 152; Bastian,

‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. i. p. 112.

Footnote 566:

Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. iii. pp. 167-8; Wilkinson in Rawlinson’s

‘Herodotus,’ vol. ii. p. 79; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp. 972-6; W. G. Palgrave,

‘Arabia,’ vol. i. p. 251; Squier and Davis, ‘Monuments of Mississippi

Valley,’ p. 134; Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 258.

Footnote 567:

Latham, ‘Descr. Eth.’ vol. i. p. 43; Lejean in ‘Rev. des Deux Mondes,’

15 Feb. 1862, p. 856; Apollodor. iii. 8. Compare the derivation of

_Arequipa_ by the Peruvians from the words _ari! quepay_== ‘yes!

remain,’ said to have been addressed to the colonists by the Inca:

Markham, ‘Quichua Gr. and Dic.;’ also the supposed etymology of

_Dahome_, _Danh-ho-men_== ‘on the belly of Danh,’ from the story of

King Dako building his palace on the body of the conquered King Danh:

Burton, in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 401.

Footnote 568:

Charnock, ‘Verba Nominalia,’ s.v. ‘chic;’ see Francisque-Michel,

‘Argot,’ s.v.

Footnote 569:

‘Spectator,’ No. 147; Brand, ‘Pop. Ant.’ vol. iii. p. 93; Hotten,

‘Slang Dictionary,’ p. 3; Charnock, s.v. ‘cant.’ As to the real

etymology, that from the beggar’s whining _chaunt_ is defective, for

the beggar drops this tone exactly when he _cants_, i.e., talks jargon

with his fellows. If _cant_ is directly from Latin _cantare_, it will

correspond with Italian _cantare_ and French _chanter_, both used as

slang words for to speak (Francisque-Michel, ‘Argot’). A Keltic origin

is more probable, Gaelic and Irish _cainnt_, _caint_ == talk,

language, dialect (see Wedgwood ‘Etymological Dictionary’). The Gaelic

equivalents for pedlars’ French or tramps’ slang, are ‘Laidionn nan

ceard,’ ‘_cainnt_ cheard,’ i.e., tinkers’ Latin or jargon, or exactly

‘cairds’ _cant_.’ A deeper connexion between _cainnt_ and _cantare_

does not affect this.

Footnote 570:

See also Francisque-Michel, ‘Argot,’ s.v. ‘maccabe, macchabée’==noyé.

Footnote 571:

Musters, ‘Patagonians,’ pp. 69, 184.

Footnote 572:

Döhne, ‘Zulu Dic.’ p. 417; Arbousset and Daumas, p. 269; Waitz, vol.

ii. pp. 349, 352.

Footnote 573:

Shortland, ‘Trads. of N. Z.’ p. 224.

Footnote 574:

On the adoption of imaginary ancestors as connected with the fiction

of a common descent, and the important political and religious effects

of these proceedings, see especially Grote, ‘History of Greece,’ vol.

i.; McLennan, ‘Primitive Marriage;’ Maine, ‘Ancient Law.’ Interesting

details on eponymic ancestors in Pott, ‘Anti-Kaulen, oder Mythische

Vorstellungen vom Ursprnge der Völker and Sprachen.’

Footnote 575:

Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol. i. p. 54; see p. 283.

Footnote 576:

Macpherson, ‘India,’ p. 78.

Footnote 577:

Vambéry, ‘Central Asia,’ p. 325; see also Latham, ‘Descr. Eth.’ vol.

i. p. 456 (Ostyaks); Georgi, ‘Reise im Russ. Reich,’ vol. i. 242

(Tunguz).

Footnote 578:

Barth, ‘N. & Centr. Afr.’ vol. ii. p. 71.

Footnote 579:

J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrelig.’ p. 574.

Footnote 580:

Martius, vol. i. pp. 180-4; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 416.

Footnote 581:

Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. p. 319, part iii. p. 268, see

part ii. p. 49; Catlin, vol. ii. p. 128; J. G. Müller, pp. 134, 327.

Footnote 582:

Grote, ‘Hist. of Greece;’ Pausan. iii. 20; Diod. Sic. v.; Apollodor.

Bibl. i. 7, 3, vi. 1, 4; Herodot. i. 171.

Footnote 583:

Max Müller in Bunsen, vol. i. p. 338; Tabari, part i. ch. xlv., lxix.

Footnote 584:

Sir W. Jones in ‘As. Res.’ vol. ii. p. 24; Vansittart, ibid. p. 67;

see Campbell, in ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ 1866, part ii. p. 7.

Footnote 585:

Will, de Rubruquis in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 23; Gabelentz in

‘Zeitschr. für die Kunde des Morgenlandes,’ vol. ii. p. 73; Schmidt,

‘Völker Mittel-Asien,’ p. 6.

Footnote 586:

See also Pott, ‘Anti-Kaulen,’ pp. 19, 23; ‘Rassen,’ pp. 70, 153; and

remarks on colonization-myths in Max Müller, ‘Chips,’ vol. ii. p. 68.

Footnote 587:

Seemann, ‘Viti,’ p. 311; Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 252.

Footnote 588:

Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 69.

Footnote 589:

Schoolcraft, ‘Algic Res.’ vol. i. p. 122; ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. p.

320, part ii. p. 230.

Footnote 590:

J. R. Wise, ‘The New Forest,’ p. 160; Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 268;

Max Müller, ‘Chips,’ vol. i. p. 249; M. A. Walker, ‘Macedonia,’ p.

192; Movers, ‘Phönizier,’ vol. i. p. 665; Lucian. de Deâ Syriâ, 8;

Hunt, ‘Pop. Rom.’ 2nd Series, p. 15; Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ pp.

16, 94; Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 59, vol. iii. p. 185; Buchanan,

‘Mysore, &c.’ in Pinkerton, vol. viii. p. 714.

Footnote 591:

Sprenger, ‘Leben des Mohammad,’ vol. i. pp. 78, 119, 162, 310.

Footnote 592:

Marco Polo, book i. ch. viii.

Footnote 593:

Grote, vol. i. p. 347.

Footnote 594:

Welcker, vol. i. p. 756.

Footnote 595:

Xenoph. Memorabilia, ii. 1.

Footnote 596:

Oldfield in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 259.

Footnote 597:

Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 255.

Footnote 598:

Wilson in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iv. p. 306.

Footnote 599:

J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ p. 382.

Footnote 600:

Bleek, ‘Reynard in S. Afr.’ pp. 5, 47, 67 (these are not among the

stories which seem recently borrowed from Europeans). See ‘Early

History of Mankind,’ p. 10.

Footnote 601:

Callaway, ‘Zulu Tales,’ vol. i. p. 355.

Footnote 602:

Schoolcraft, ‘Algic Res.’ vol. i. p. 160; see pp. 43, 51.

Footnote 603:

Jakob Grimm, ‘Reinhart Fuchs,’ Introd.

Footnote 604:

Account of Laura Bridgman, p. 120.

Footnote 605:

Bowring, ‘Siam,’ vol. i. p. 313; Hardy, ‘Manual of Budhism,’ p. 98.

See the fable of the ‘Crow and Pitcher,’ in Plin. x. 60, and Bastian,

‘Mensch,’ vol. i. p. 76.

Footnote 606:

Jameson, ‘History of Our Lord in Art,’ vol. i. p. 375.

CHAPTER XI.

ANIMISM.

Religious ideas generally appear among low races of Mankind—Negative

statements on this subject frequently misleading and mistaken: many

cases uncertain—Minimum definition of Religion—Doctrine of Spiritual

Beings, here termed Animism—Animism treated as belonging to Natural

Religion—Animism divided into two sections, the philosophy of Souls,

and of other Spirits—Doctrine of Souls, its prevalence and

definition among the lower races—Definition of Apparitional Soul or

Ghost-Soul—It is a theoretical conception of primitive Philosophy,

designed to account for phenomena now classed under Biology,

especially Life and Death, Health and Disease, Sleep and Dreams,

Trance and Visions—Relation of Soul in name and nature to Shadow,

Blood, Breath—Division of Plurality of Souls—Soul cause of Life; its

restoration to body when supposed absent—Exit of Soul in

Trances—Dreams and Visions: theory of exit of dreamer’s or seer’s

own soul; theory of visits received by them from other

souls—Ghost-Soul seen in Apparitions—Wraiths and Doubles—Soul has

form of body; suffers mutilation with it—Voice of Ghost—Soul treated

and defined as of Material Substance; this appears to be the

original doctrine—Transmission of Souls to service in future life by

Funeral Sacrifice of wives, attendants, &c.—Souls of Animals—Their

transmission by Funeral Sacrifice—Souls of Plants—Souls of

Objects—Their transmission by Funeral Sacrifice—Relation of doctrine

of Object-Souls to Epicurean theory of Ideas—Historical development

of Doctrine of Souls, from the Ethereal Soul of primitive Biology to

the Immaterial Soul of modern Theology.

Are there, or have there been, tribes of men so low in culture as to

have no religious conceptions whatever? This is practically the question

of the universality of religion, which for so many centuries has been

affirmed and denied, with a confidence in striking contrast to the

imperfect evidence on which both affirmation and denial have been based.

Ethnographers, if looking to a theory of development to explain

civilization, and regarding its successive stages as arising one from

another, would receive with peculiar interest accounts of tribes devoid

of all religion. Here, they would naturally say, are men who have no

religion because their forefathers had none, men who represent a

præ-religious condition of the human race, out of which in the course of

time religious conditions have arisen. It does not, however, seem

advisable to start from this ground in an investigation of religious

development. Though the theoretical niche is ready and convenient, the

actual statue to fill it is not forthcoming. The case is in some degree

similar to that of the tribes asserted to exist without language or

without the use of fire; nothing in the nature of things seems to forbid

the possibility of such existence, but as a matter of fact the tribes

are not found. Thus the assertion that rude non-religious tribes have

been known in actual existence, though in theory possible, and perhaps

in fact true, does not at present rest on that sufficient proof which,

for an exceptional state of things, we are entitled to demand.

It is not unusual for the very writer who declares in general terms the

absence of religious phenomena among some savage people, himself to give

evidence that shows his expressions to be misleading. Thus Dr. Lang not

only declares that the aborigines of Australia have no idea of a supreme

divinity, creator, and judge, no object of worship, no idol, temple, or

sacrifice, but that ‘in short, they have nothing whatever of the

character of religion, or of religious observance, to distinguish them

from the beasts that perish.’ More than one writer has since made use of

this telling statement, but without referring to certain details which

occur in the very same book. From these it appears that a disease like

small-pox, which sometimes attacks the natives, is ascribed by them ‘to

the influence of Budyah, an evil spirit who delights in mischief;’ that

when the natives rob a wild bees’ hive, they generally leave a little of

the honey for Buddai; that at certain biennial gatherings of the

Queensland tribes, young girls are slain in sacrifice to propitiate some

evil divinity; and that, lastly, according to the evidence of the Rev.

W. Ridley, ‘whenever he has conversed with the aborigines, he found them

to have definite traditions concerning supernatural beings—Baiame, whose

voice they hear in thunder, and who made all things, Turramullum the

chief of demons, who is the author of disease, mischief, and wisdom, and

appears in the form of a serpent at their great assemblies, &c.’[607] By

the concurring testimony of a crowd of observers, it is known that the

natives of Australia were at their discovery, and have since remained, a

race with minds saturated with the most vivid belief in souls, demons,

and deities. In Africa, Mr. Moffat’s declaration as to the Bechuanas is

scarcely less surprising—that ‘man’s immortality was never heard of

among that people,’ he having remarked in the sentence next before, that

the word for the shades or manes of the dead is ‘liriti.’[608] In South

America, again, Don Felix de Azara comments on the positive falsity of

the ecclesiastics’ assertion that the native tribes have a religion. He

simply declares that they have none; nevertheless in the course of his

work he mentions such facts as that the Payaguas bury arms and clothing

with their dead and have some notions of a future life, and that the

Guanas believe in a Being who rewards good and punishes evil. In fact,

this author’s reckless denial of religion and law to the lower races of

this region justifies D’Orbigny’s sharp criticism, that, ‘this is indeed

what he says of all the nations he describes, while actually proving the

contrary of his thesis by the very facts he alleges in its

support.’[609]

Such cases show how deceptive are judgments to which breadth and

generality are given by the use of wide words in narrow senses. Lang,

Moffat, and Azara are authors to whom ethnography owes much valuable

knowledge of the tribes they visited, but they seem hardly to have

recognized anything short of the organized and established theology of

the higher races as being religion at all. They attribute irreligion to

tribes whose doctrines are unlike theirs, in much the same manner as

theologians have so often attributed atheism to those whose deities

differed from their own, from the time when the ancient invading Aryans

described the aboriginal tribes of India as _adeva_, i.e. ‘godless,’ and

the Greeks fixed the corresponding term ἄθεοι on the early Christians as

unbelievers in the classic gods, to the comparatively modern ages when

disbelievers in witchcraft and apostolical succession were denounced as

atheists; and down to our own day, when controversialists are apt to

infer, as in past centuries, that naturalists who support a theory of

development of species therefore necessarily hold atheistic

opinions.[610] These are in fact but examples of a general perversion of

judgment in theological matters, among the results of which is a popular

misconception of the religions of the lower races, simply amazing to

students who have reached a higher point of view. Some missionaries, no

doubt, thoroughly understand the minds of the savages they have to deal

with, and indeed it is from men like Cranz, Dobrizhoffer, Charlevoix,

Ellis, Hardy, Callaway, J. L. Wilson, T. Williams, that we have obtained

our best knowledge of the lower phases of religious belief. But for the

most part the ‘religious world’ is so occupied in hating and despising

the beliefs of the heathen whose vast regions of the globe are painted

black on the missionary maps, that they have little time or capacity

left to understand them. It cannot be so with those who fairly seek to

comprehend the nature and meaning of the lower phases of religion.

These, while fully alive to the absurdities believed and the horrors

perpetrated in its name, will yet regard with kindly interest all record

of men’s earnest seeking after truth with such light as they could find.

Such students will look for meaning, however crude and childish, at the

root of doctrines often most dark to the believers who accept them most

zealously; they will search for the reasonable thought which once gave

life to observances now become in seeming or reality the most abject and

superstitious folly. The reward of these enquirers will be a more

rational comprehension of the faiths in whose midst they dwell, for no

more can he who understands but one religion understand even that

religion, than the man who knows but one language can understand that

language. No religion of mankind lies in utter isolation from the rest,

and the thoughts and principles of modern Christianity are attached to

intellectual clues which run back through far præ-Christian ages to the

very origin of human civilization, perhaps even of human existence.

While observers who have had fair opportunities of studying the religion

of savages have thus sometimes done scant justice to the facts before

their eyes, the hasty denials of others who have judged without even

facts can carry no great weight. A 16th-century traveller gave an

account of the natives of Florida which is typical of such: ‘Touching

the religion of this people, which wee have found, for want of their

language wee could not understand neither by signs nor gesture that they

had any religion or lawe at all.... We suppose that they have no

religion at all, and that they live at their own libertie.’[611] Better

knowledge of these Floridans nevertheless showed that they had a

religion, and better knowledge has reversed many another hasty assertion

to the same effect; as when writers used to declare that the natives of

Madagascar had no idea of a future state, and no word for soul or

spirit;[612] or when Dampier enquired after the religion of the natives

of Timor, and was told that they had none;[613] or when Sir Thomas Roe

landed in Saldanha Bay on his way to the court of the Great Mogul, and

remarked of the Hottentots that ‘they have left off their custom of

stealing, but know no God or religion.’[614] Among the numerous accounts

collected by Lord Avebury as evidence bearing on the absence or low

development of religion among low races,[615] some may be selected as

lying open to criticism from this point of view. Thus the statement that

the Samoan Islanders had no religion cannot stand, in face of the

elaborate description by the Rev. G. Turner of the Samoan religion

itself; and the assertion that the Tupinambas of Brazil had no religion

is one not to be received on merely negative evidence, for the religious

doctrines and practices of the Tupi race have been recorded by Lery, De

Laet, and other writers. Even with much time and care and knowledge of

language, it is not always easy to elicit from savages the details of

their theology. They try to hide from the prying and contemptuous

foreigner their worship of gods who seem to shrink, like their

worshippers, before the white man and his mightier Deity. Mr. Sproat’s

experience in Vancouver’s Island is an apt example of this state of

things. He says: ‘I was two years among the Ahts, with my mind

constantly directed towards the subject of their religious beliefs,

before I could discover that they possessed any ideas as to an

overruling power or a future state of existence. The traders on the

coast, and other persons well acquainted with the people, told me that

they had no such ideas, and this opinion was confirmed by conversation

with many of the less intelligent savages; but at last I succeeded in

getting a satisfactory clue.’[616] It then appeared that the Ahts had

all the time been hiding a whole characteristic system of religious

doctrines as to souls and their migrations, the spirits who do good and

ill to men, and the great gods above all. Thus, even where no positive

proof of religious ideas among any particular tribe has reached us, we

should distrust its denial by observers whose acquaintance with the

tribe in question has not been intimate as well as kindly. It is said of

the Andaman Islanders that they have not the rudest elements of a

religious faith; yet it appears that the natives did not even display to

the foreigners the rude music which they actually possessed, so that

they could scarcely have been expected to be communicative as to their

theology, if they had any.[617] In our time the most striking negation

of the religion of savage tribes is that published by Sir Samuel Baker,

in a paper read in 1866 before the Ethnological Society of London, as

follows: ‘The most northern tribes of the White Nile are the Dinkas,

Shillooks, Nuehr, Kytch, Bohr, Aliab, and Shir. A general description

will suffice for the whole, excepting the Kytch. Without any exception,

they are without a belief in a Supreme Being, neither have they any form

of worship or idolatry; nor is the darkness of their minds enlightened

by even a ray of superstition.’ Had this distinguished explorer spoken

only of the Latukas, or of other tribes hardly known to ethnographers

except through his own intercourse with them, his denial of any

religious consciousness to them would have been at least entitled to

stand as the best procurable account, until more intimate communication

should prove or disprove it. But in speaking thus of comparatively well

known tribes such as the Dinkas, Shilluks and Nuehr, Sir S. Baker

ignores the existence of published evidence, such as describes the

sacrifices of the Dinkas, their belief in good and evil spirits (adjok

and djyok), their good deity and heaven-dwelling creator, Dendid, as

likewise Néar the Deity of the Nuehr, and the Shilluk’s creator, who is

described as visiting, like other spirits, a sacred wood or tree.

Kaufmann, Brun-Rollet, Lejean, and other observers, had thus placed on

record details of the religion of these White Nile tribes, years before

Sir S. Baker’s rash denial that they had any religion at all.[618]

The first requisite in a systematic study of the religions of the lower

races, is to lay down a rudimentary definition of religion. By requiring

in this definition the belief in a supreme deity or of judgment after

death, the adoration of idols or the practice of sacrifice, or other

partially-diffused doctrines or rites, no doubt many tribes may be

excluded from the category of religious. But such narrow definition has

the fault of identifying religion rather with particular developments

than with the deeper motive which underlies them. It seems best to fall

back at once on this essential source, and simply to claim, as a minimum

definition of Religion, the belief in Spiritual Beings. If this standard

be applied to the descriptions of low races as to religion, the

following results will appear. It cannot be positively asserted that

every existing tribe recognizes the belief in spiritual beings, for the

native condition of a considerable number is obscure in this respect,

and from the rapid change or extinction they are undergoing, may ever

remain so. It would be yet more unwarranted to set down every tribe

mentioned in history, or known to us by the discovery of antiquarian

relics, as necessarily having passed the defined minimum of religion.

Greater still would be the unwisdom of declaring such a rudimentary

belief natural or instinctive in all human tribes of all times; for no

evidence justifies the opinion that man, known to be capable of so vast

an intellectual development, cannot have emerged from a non-religious

condition, previous to that religious condition in which he happens at

present to come with sufficient clearness within our range of knowledge.

It is desirable, however, to take our basis of enquiry in observation

rather than from speculation. Here, so far as I can judge from the

immense mass of accessible evidence, we have to admit that the belief in

spiritual beings appears among all low races with whom we have attained

to thoroughly intimate acquaintance; whereas the assertion of absence of

such belief must apply either to ancient tribes, or to more or less

imperfectly described modern ones. The exact bearing of this state of

things on the problem of the origin of religion may be thus briefly

stated. Were it distinctly proved that non-religious savages exist or

have existed, these might be at least plausibly claimed as

representatives of the condition of Man before he arrived at the

religious state of culture. It is not desirable, however, that this

argument should be put forward, for the asserted existence of the

non-religious tribes in question rests, as we have seen, on evidence

often mistaken and never conclusive. The argument for the natural

evolution of religious ideas among mankind is not invalidated by the

rejection of an ally too weak at present to give effectual help.

Non-religious tribes may not exist in our day, but the fact bears no

more decisively on the development of religion, than the impossibility

of finding a modern English village without scissors or books or

lucifer-matches bears on the fact that there was a time when no such

things existed in the land.

I propose here, under the name of Animism, to investigate the deep-lying

doctrine of Spiritual Beings, which embodies the very essence of

Spiritualistic as opposed to Materialistic philosophy. Animism is not a

new technical term, though now seldom used.[619] From its special

relation to the doctrine of the soul, it will be seen to have a peculiar

appropriateness to the view here taken of the mode in which theological

ideas have been developed among mankind. The word Spiritualism, though

it may be, and sometimes is, used in a general sense, has this obvious

defect to us, that it has become the designation of a particular modern

sect, who indeed hold extreme spiritualistic views, but cannot be taken

as typical representatives of these views in the world at large. The

sense of Spiritualism in its wider acceptation, the general belief in

spiritual beings, is here given to Animism.

Animism characterizes tribes very low in the scale of humanity, and

thence ascends, deeply modified in its transmission, but from first to

last preserving an unbroken continuity, into the midst of high modern

culture. Doctrines adverse to it, so largely held by individuals or

schools, are usually due not to early lowness of civilization, but to

later changes in the intellectual course, to divergence from, or

rejection of, ancestral faiths; and such newer developments do not

affect the present enquiry as to the fundamental religious condition of

mankind. Animism is, in fact, the groundwork of the Philosophy of

Religion, from that of savages up to that of civilized men. And although

it may at first sight seem to afford but a bare and meagre definition of

a minimum of religion, it will be found practically sufficient; for

where the root is, the branches will generally be produced. It is

habitually found that the theory of Animism divides into two great

dogmas, forming parts of one consistent doctrine; first, concerning

souls of individual creatures, capable of continued existence after the

death or destruction of the body; second, concerning other spirits,

upward to the rank of powerful deities. Spiritual beings are held to

affect or control the events of the material world, and man’s life here

and hereafter; and it being considered that they hold intercourse with

men, and receive pleasure or displeasure from human actions, the belief

in their existence leads naturally, and it might almost be said

inevitably, sooner or later to active reverence and propitiation. Thus

Animism in its full development, includes the belief in souls and in a

future state, in controlling deities and subordinate spirits, these

doctrines practically resulting in some kind of active worship. One

great element of religion, that moral element which among the higher

nations forms its most vital part, is indeed little represented in the

religion of the lower races. It is not that these races have no moral

sense or no moral standard, for both are strongly marked among them, if

not in formal precept, at least in that traditional consensus of society

which we call public opinion, according to which certain actions are

held to be good or bad, right or wrong. It is that the conjunction of

ethics and Animistic philosophy, so intimate and powerful in the higher

culture, seems scarcely yet to have begun in the lower. I propose here

hardly to touch upon the purely moral aspects of religion, but rather to

study the animism of the world so far as it constitutes, as

unquestionably it does constitute, an ancient and world-wide philosophy,

of which belief is the theory and worship is the practice. Endeavouring

to shape the materials for an enquiry hitherto strangely undervalued and

neglected, it will now be my task to bring as clearly as may be into

view the fundamental animism of the lower races, and in some slight and

broken outline to trace its course into higher regions of civilization.

Here let me state once for all two principal conditions under which the

present research is carried on. First, as to the religious doctrines and

practices examined, these are treated as belonging to theological

systems devised by human reason, without supernatural aid or revelation;

in other words, as being developments of Natural Religion. Second, as to

the connexion between similar ideas and rites in the religions of the

savage and the civilized world. While dwelling at some length on

doctrines and ceremonies of the lower races, and sometimes

particularizing for special reasons the related doctrines and ceremonies

of the higher nations, it has not seemed my proper task to work out in

detail the problems thus suggested among the philosophies and creeds of

Christendom. Such applications, extending farthest from the direct scope

of a work on primitive culture, are briefly stated in general terms, or

touched in slight allusion, or taken for granted without remark.

Educated readers possess the information required to work out their

general bearing on theology, while more technical discussion is left to

philosophers and theologians specially occupied with such arguments.

The first branch of the subject to be considered is the doctrine of

human and other Souls, an examination of which will occupy the rest of

the present chapter. What the doctrine of the soul is among the lower

races, may be explained in stating the animistic theory of its

development. It seems as though thinking men, as yet at a low level of

culture, were deeply impressed by two groups of biological problems. In

the first place, what is it that makes the difference between a living

body and a dead one; what causes waking, sleep, trance, disease, death?

In the second place, what are those human shapes which appear in dreams

and visions? Looking at these two groups of phenomena, the ancient

savage philosophers probably made their first step by the obvious

inference that every man has two things belonging to him, namely, a life

and a phantom. These two are evidently in close connexion with the body,

the life as enabling it to feel and think and act, the phantom as being

its image or second self; both, also, are perceived to be things

separable from the body, the life as able to go away and leave it

insensible or dead, the phantom as appearing to people at a distance

from it. The second step would seem also easy for savages to make,

seeing how extremely difficult civilized men have found it to unmake. It

is merely to combine the life and the phantom. As both belong to the

body, why should they not also belong to one another, and be

manifestations of one and the same soul? Let them then be considered as

united, and the result is that well-known conception which may be

described as an apparitional-soul, a ghost-soul. This, at any rate,

corresponds with the actual conception of the personal soul or spirit

among the lower races, which may be defined as follows: It is a thin

unsubstantial human image, in its nature a sort of vapour, film, or

shadow; the cause of life and thought in the individual it animates;

independently possessing the personal consciousness and volition of its

corporeal owner, past or present; capable of leaving the body far

behind, to flash swiftly from place to place; mostly impalpable and

invisible, yet also manifesting physical power, and especially appearing

to men waking or asleep as a phantasm separate from the body of which it

bears the likeness; continuing to exist and appear to men after the

death of that body; able to enter into, possess, and act in the bodies

of other men, of animals, and even of things. Though this definition is

by no means of universal application, it has sufficient generality to be

taken as a standard, modified by more or less divergence among any

particular people. Far from these world-wide opinions being arbitrary or

conventional products, it is seldom even justifiable to consider their

uniformity among distant races as proving communication of any sort.

They are doctrines answering in the most forcible way to the plain

evidence of men’s senses, as interpreted by a fairly consistent and

rational primitive philosophy. So well, indeed, does primitive animism

account for the facts of nature, that it has held its place into the

higher levels of education. Though classic and mediæval philosophy

modified it much, and modern philosophy has handled it yet more

unsparingly, it has so far retained the traces of its original

character, that heirlooms of primitive ages may be claimed in the

existing psychology of the civilized world. Out of the vast mass of

evidence, collected among the most various and distant races of mankind,

typical details may now be selected to display the earlier theory of the

soul, the relation of the parts of this theory, and the manner in which

these parts have been abandoned, modified, or kept up, along the course

of culture.

To understand the popular conceptions of the human soul or spirit, it is

instructive to notice the words which have been found suitable to

express it. The ghost or phantasm seen by the dreamer or the visionary

is an unsubstantial form, like a shadow or reflexion, and thus the

familiar term of the _shade_ comes in to express the soul. Thus the

Tasmanian word for the shadow is also that for the spirit;[620] the

Algonquins describe a man’s soul as _otahchuk_, ‘his shadow;’[621] the

Quiché language uses _natub_ for ‘shadow, soul;’[622] the Arawak _ueja_

means ‘shadow, soul, image;’[623] the Abipones made the one word

_loákal_ serve for ‘shadow, soul, echo, image.’[624] The Zulus not only

use the word _tunzi_ for ‘shadow, spirit, ghost,’ but they consider that

at death the shadow of a man will in some way depart from the corpse, to

become an ancestral spirit.[625] The Basutos not only call the spirit

remaining after death the _seriti_ or ‘shadow,’ but they think that if a

man walks on the river bank, a crocodile may seize his shadow in the

water and draw him in;[626] while in Old Calabar there is found the same

identification of the spirit with the _ukpon_ or ‘shadow,’ for a man to

lose which is fatal.[627] There are thus found among the lower races not

only the types of those familiar classic terms, the _skia_ and _umbra_,

but also what seems the fundamental thought of the stories of shadowless

men still current in the folklore of Europe, and familiar to modern

readers in Chamisso’s tale of Peter Schlemihl. Thus the dead in

Purgatory knew that Dante was alive when they saw that, unlike theirs,

his figure cast a shadow on the ground.[628] Other attributes are taken

into the notion of soul or spirit, with especial regard to its being the

cause of life. Thus the Caribs, connecting the pulses with spiritual

beings, and especially considering that in the heart dwells man’s chief

soul, destined to a future heavenly life, could reasonably use the one

word _iouanni_ for ‘soul, life, heart.’[629] The Tongans supposed the

soul to exist throughout the whole extension of the body, but

particularly in the heart. On one occasion, the natives were declaring

to a European that a man buried months ago was nevertheless still alive.

‘And one, endeavouring to make me understand what he meant, took hold of

my hand, and squeezing it, said, “This will die, but the life that is

within you will never die;” with his other hand pointing to my

heart.’[630] So the Basutos say of a dead man that his heart is gone

out, and of one recovering from sickness that his heart is coming

back.[631] This corresponds to the familiar Old World view of the heart

as the prime mover in life, thought, and passion. The connexion of soul

and blood, familiar to the Karens and Papuas, appears prominently in

Jewish and Arabic philosophy.[632] To educated moderns the idea of the

Macusi Indians of Guiana may seem quaint, that although the body will

decay, ‘the man in our eyes’ will not die, but wander about.[633] Yet

the association of personal animation with the pupil of the eye is

familiar to European folklore, which not unreasonably discerned a sign

of bewitchment or approaching death in the disappearance of the image,

pupil, or baby, from the dim eyeballs of the sick man.[634]

The act of breathing, so characteristic of the higher animals during

life, and coinciding so closely with life in its departure, has been

repeatedly and naturally identified with the life or soul itself. Laura

Bridgman showed in her instructive way the analogy between the effects

of restricted sense and restricted civilization, when one day she made

the gesture of taking something away from her mouth: ‘I dreamed,’ she

explained in words, ‘that God took away my breath to heaven.’[635] It is

thus that West Australians used one word _waug_ for ‘breath, spirit,

soul;[636] that in the Netela language of California, _piuts_ means

‘life, breath, soul;[637] that certain Greenlanders reckoned two souls

to man, namely his shadow and his breath;[638] that the Malays say the

soul of the dying man escapes through his nostrils, and in Java use the

same word _ñawa_ for ‘breath, life, soul.’[639] How the notions of life,

heart, breath, and phantom unite in the one conception of a soul or

spirit, and at the same time how loose and vague such ideas are among

barbaric races, is well brought into view in the answers to a religious

inquest held in 1528 among the natives of Nicaragua. ‘When they die,

there comes out of their mouth something that resembles a person, and is

called _julio_ [Aztec _yuli_==to live]. This being goes to the place

where the man and woman are. It is like a person, but does not die, and

the body remains here.’ _Question._ ‘Do those who go up on high keep the

same body, the same face, and the same limbs, as here below?’ _Answer._

‘No; there is only the heart.’ _Question._ ‘But since they tear out

their hearts [i.e. when a captive was sacrificed], what happens then?’

_Answer._ ‘It is not precisely the heart, but that in them which makes

them live, and that quits the body when they die.’ Or, as stated in

another interrogatory, ‘It is not their heart that goes up above, but

what makes them live, that is to say, the breath that issues from their

mouth and is called _julio_.’[640] The conception of the soul as breath

may be followed up through Semitic and Aryan etymology, and thus into

the main streams of the philosophy of the world. Hebrew shows _nephesh_,

‘breath,’ passing into all the meanings of ‘life, soul, mind, animal,’

while _ruach_ and _neshamah_ make the like transition from ‘breath’ to

‘spirit’; and to these the Arabic _nefs_ and _ruh_ correspond. The same

is the history of Sanskrit _âtman_ and _prâna_, of Greek _psychē_ and

_pneuma_, of Latin _animus_, _anima_, _spiritus_. So Slavonic _duch_ has

developed the meaning of ‘breath’ into that of soul or spirit; and the

dialects of the Gypsies have this word _dūk_ with the meanings of

‘breath, spirit, ghost,’ whether these pariahs brought the word from

India as part of their inheritance of Aryan speech, or whether they

adopted it in their migration across Slavonic lands.[641] German _geist_

and English _ghost_, too, may possibly have the same original sense of

breath. And if any should think such expressions due to mere metaphor,

they may judge the strength of the implied connexion between breath and

spirit by cases of most unequivocal significance. Among the Seminoles of

Florida, when a woman 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. These Indians could have well understood

why at the death-bed of an ancient Roman, the nearest kinsman leant over

to inhale the last breath of the departing (et excipies hanc animam ore

pio). Their state of mind is kept up to this day among Tyrolese

peasants, who can still fancy a good man’s soul to issue from his mouth

at death like a little white cloud.[642]

It will be shown that men, in their composite and confused notions of

the soul, have brought into connexion a list of manifestations of life

and thought even more multifarious than this. But also, seeking to avoid

such perplexity of combination, they have sometimes endeavoured to

define and classify more closely, especially by the theory that man has

a combination of several kinds of spirit, soul, or image, to which

different functions belong. Already in the barbaric world such

classification has been invented or adopted. Thus the Fijians

distinguished between a man’s ‘dark spirit’ or shadow, which goes to

Hades, and his ‘light spirit’ or reflexion in water or a mirror, which

stays near where he dies.[643] The Malagasy say that the _saina_ or mind

vanishes at death, the _aina_ or life becomes mere air, but the

_matoatoa_ or ghost hovers round the tomb.[644] In North America, the

duality of the soul is a strongly marked Algonquin belief; one soul goes

out and sees dreams while the other remains behind; at death one of the

two abides with the body, and for this the survivors leave offerings of

food, while the other departs to the land of the dead. A division into

three souls is also known, and the Dakotas say that man has four souls,

one remaining with the corpse, one staying in the village, one going in

the air, and one to the land of spirits.[645] The Karens distinguish

between the ‘là’ or ‘kelah,’ the personal life-phantom, and the ‘thah,’

the responsible moral soul.[646] More or less under Hindu influence, the

Khonds have a fourfold division, as follows: the first soul is that

capable of beatification or restoration to Boora the Good Deity; the

second is attached to a Khond tribe on earth and is re-born generation

after generation, so that at the birth of each child the priest asks who

has returned; the third goes out to hold spiritual intercourse, leaving

the body in a languid state, and it is this soul which can pass for a

time into a tiger, and transmigrates for punishment after death; the

fourth dies on the dissolution of the body.[647] Such classifications

resemble those of higher nations, as for instance the three-fold

division of shade, manes, and spirit:

‘Bis duo sunt homini, manes, caro, spiritus, umbra:

Quatuor ista loci bis duo suscipiunt.

Terra tegit carnem, tumulum circumvolat umbra,

Orcus habet manes, spiritus astra petit.’

Not attempting to follow up the details of such psychical division into

the elaborate systems of literary nations, I shall not discuss the

distinction which the ancient Egyptians seem to have made in the Ritual

of the Dead between the man’s _ba_, _akh_, _ka_, _khaba_, translated by

Dr. Birch as his ‘soul,’ ‘mind,’ ‘image,’ ‘shade,’ or the Rabbinical

division into what may be roughly described as the bodily, spiritual,

and celestial souls, or the distinction between the emanative and

genetic souls in Hindu philosophy, or the distribution of life,

apparition, ancestral spirit, among the three souls of the Chinese, or

the demarcations of the _nous_, _psychē_, and _pneuma_, or of the

_anima_ and _animus_, or the famous classic and mediæval theories of the

vegetal, sensitive, and rational souls. Suffice it to point out here

that such speculation dates back to the barbaric condition of our race,

in a state fairly comparing as to scientific value with much that has

gained esteem within the precincts of higher culture. It would be a

difficult task to treat such classification on a consistent logical

basis. Terms corresponding with those of life, mind, soul, spirit,

ghost, and so forth, are not thought of as describing really separate

entities, so much as the several forms and functions of one individual

being. Thus the confusion which here prevails in our own thought and

language, in a manner typical of the thought and language of mankind in

general, is in fact due not merely to vagueness of terms, but to an

ancient theory of substantial unity which underlies them. Such ambiguity

of language, however, will be found to interfere little with the present

enquiry, for the details given of the nature and action of spirits,

souls, phantoms, will themselves define the exact sense such words are

to be taken in.

The early animistic theory of vitality, regarding the functions of life

as caused by the soul, offers to the savage mind an explanation of

several bodily and mental conditions, as being effects of a departure of

the soul or some of its constituent spirits. This theory holds a wide

and strong position in savage biology. The South Australians express it

when they say of one insensible or unconscious, that he is

‘wilyamarraba,’ i.e., ‘without soul.’[648] Among the Algonquin Indians

of North America, we hear of sickness being accounted for by the

patient’s ‘shadow’ being unsettled or detached from his body, and of the

convalescent being reproached for exposing himself before his shadow was

safely settled down in him; where we should say that a man was ill and

recovered, they would consider that he died, but came again. Another

account from among the same race explains the condition of men lying in

lethargy or trance; their souls have travelled to the banks of the River

of Death, but have been driven back and return to reanimate their

bodies.[649] Among the Fijians, ‘when any one faints or dies, their

spirit, it is said, may sometimes be brought back by calling after it;

and occasionally the ludicrous scene is witnessed of a stout man lying

at full length, and bawling out lustily for the return of his own

soul.’[650] To the negroes of North Guinea, derangement or dotage is

caused by the patient being prematurely deserted by his soul, sleep

being a more temporary withdrawal.[651] Thus, in various countries, the

bringing back of lost souls becomes a regular part of the sorcerer’s or

priest’s profession. The Salish Indians of Oregon regard the spirit as

distinct from the vital principle, and capable of quitting the body for

a short time without the patient being conscious of its absence; but to

avoid fatal consequences it must be restored as soon as possible, and

accordingly the medicine-man in solemn form replaces it down through the

patient’s head.[652] The Turanian or Tatar races of Northern Asia

strongly hold the theory of the soul’s departure in disease, and among

the Buddhist tribes the Lamas carry out the ceremony of soul-restoration

in most elaborate form. When a man has been robbed by a demon of his

rational soul, and has only his animal soul left, his senses and memory

grow weak and he falls into a dismal state. Then the Lama undertakes to

cure him, and with quaint rites exorcises the evil demon. But if this

fails, then it is the patient’s soul itself that cannot or will not find

its way back. So the sick man is laid out in his best attire and

surrounded with his most attractive possessions, the friends and

relatives go thrice round the dwelling, affectionately calling back the

soul by name, while as a further inducement the Lama reads from his book

descriptions of the pains of hell, and the dangers incurred by a soul

which wilfully abandons its body, and then at last the whole assembly

declare with one voice that the wandering spirit has returned and the

patient will recover.[653] The Karens of Burma will run about pretending

to catch a sick man’s wandering soul, or as they say with the Greeks and

Slavs, his ‘butterfly’ (leip-pya), and at last drop it down upon his

head. The Karen doctrine of the ‘là’ is indeed a perfect and well-marked

vitalistic system. This là, soul, ghost, or genius, may be separated

from the body it belongs to, and it is a matter of the deepest interest

to the Karen to keep his là with him, by calling it, making offerings of

food to it, and so forth. It is especially when the body is asleep, that

the soul goes out and wanders; if it is detained beyond a certain time,

disease ensues, and if permanently, then its owner dies. When the ‘wee’

or spirit-doctor is employed to call back the departed shade or life of

a Karen, if he cannot recover it from the region of the dead, he will

sometimes take the shade of a living man and transfer it to the dead,

while its proper owner, whose soul has ventured out in a dream, sickens

and dies. Or when a Karen becomes sick, languid and pining from his là

having left him, his friends will perform a ceremony with a garment of

the invalid’s and a fowl which is cooked and offered with rice, invoking

the spirit with formal prayers to come back to the patient.[654] This

ceremony is perhaps ethnologically connected, though it is not easy to

say by what manner of diffusion or when, with a rite still practised in

China. When a Chinese is at the point of death, and his soul is supposed

to be already out of his body, a relative may be seen holding up the

patient’s coat on a long bamboo, to which a white cock is often

fastened, while a Tauist priest by incantations brings the departed

spirit into the coat, in order to put it back into the sick man. If the

bamboo after a time turns round slowly in the holder’s hands, this shows

that the spirit is inside the garment.[655]

Such temporary exit of the soul has a world-wide application to the

proceedings of the sorcerer, priest, or seer himself. He professes to

send forth his spirit on distant journeys, and probably often believes

his soul released for a time from its bodily prison, as in the case of

that remarkable dreamer and visionary Jerome Cardan, who describes

himself as having the faculty of passing out of his senses as into

ecstasy whenever he will, feeling when he goes into this state a sort of

separation near the heart as if his soul were departing, this state

beginning from his brain and passing down his spine, and he then feeling

only that he is out of himself.[656] Thus the Australian native doctor

is alleged to obtain his initiation by visiting the world of spirits in

a trance of two or three days’ duration;[657] the Khond priest

authenticates his claim to office by remaining from one to fourteen days

in a languid and dreamy state, caused by one of his souls being away in

the divine presence;[658] the Greenland angekok’s soul goes forth from

his body to fetch his familiar demon;[659] the Turanian shaman lies in

lethargy while his soul departs to bring hidden wisdom from the land of

spirits.[660] The literature of more progressive races supplies similar

accounts. A characteristic story from old Scandinavia is that of the

Norse chief Ingimund, who shut up three Finns in a hut for three nights,

that they might visit Iceland and inform him of the lie of the country

where he was to settle; their bodies became rigid, they sent their souls

on the errand, and awakening after the three days they gave a

description of the Vatnsdæl.[661] The typical classic case is the story

of Hermotimos, whose prophetic soul went out from time to time to visit

distant regions, till at last his wife burnt the lifeless body on the

funeral pile, and when the poor soul came back, there was no longer a

dwelling for it to animate.[662] A group of the legendary visits to the

spirit-world; which will be described in the next chapter, belong to

this class. A typical spiritualistic instance may be quoted from

Jung-Stilling, who says that examples have come to his knowledge of sick

persons who, longing to see absent friends, have fallen into a swoon

during which they have appeared to the distant objects of their

affection.[663] As an illustration from our own folklore, the well-known

superstition may serve, that fasting watchers on St. John’s Eve may see

the apparitions of those doomed to die during the year come with the

clergyman to the church door and knock; these apparitions are spirits

who come forth from their bodies, for the minister has been noticed to

be much troubled in his sleep while his phantom was thus engaged, and

when one of a party of watchers fell into a sound sleep and could not be

roused, the others saw his apparition knock at the church door.[664]

Modern Europe has indeed kept closely enough to the lines of early

philosophy, for such ideas to have little strangeness to our own time.

Language preserves record of them in such expressions as ‘out of

oneself,’ ‘beside oneself,’ ‘in an ecstasy,’ and he who says that his

spirit goes forth to meet a friend, can still realize in the phrase a

meaning deeper than metaphor.

This same doctrine forms one side of the theory of dreams prevalent

among the lower races. Certain of the Greenlanders, Cranz remarks,

consider that the soul quits the body in the night and goes out hunting,

dancing, and visiting; their dreams, which are frequent and lively,

having brought them to this opinion.[665] Among the Indians of North

America, we hear of the dreamer’s soul leaving his body and wandering in

quest of things attractive to it. These things the waking man must

endeavour to obtain, lest his soul be troubled, and quit the body

altogether.[666] The New Zealanders considered the dreaming soul to

leave the body and return, even travelling to the region of the dead to

hold converse with its friends.[667] The Tagals of Luzon object to

waking a sleeper, on account of the absence of his soul.[668] The

Karens, whose theory of the wandering soul has just been noticed,

explain dreams to be what this là sees and experiences in its journeys

when it has left the body asleep. They even account with much acuteness

for the fact that we are apt to dream of people and places which we knew

before; the leip-pya, they say, can only visit the regions where the

body it belongs to has been already.[669] Onward from the savage state,

the idea of the spirit’s departure in sleep may be traced into the

speculative philosophy of higher nations, as in the Vedanta system, and

the Kabbala.[670] St. Augustine tells one of the double narratives which

so well illustrate theories of this kind. The man who tells Augustine

the story relates that, at home one night before going to sleep, he saw

coming to him a certain philosopher, most well known to him, who then

expounded to him certain Platonic passages, which when asked previously

he had refused to explain. And when he (afterwards) enquired of this

philosopher why he did at his house what he had refused to do when asked

at his own: ‘I did not do it,’ said the philosopher, ‘but I dreamt I

did.’ And thus, says Augustine, that was exhibited to one by phantastic

image while waking, which the other saw in a dream.[671] European

folklore, too, has preserved interesting details of this primitive

dream-theory, such as the fear of turning a sleeper over lest the absent

soul should miss the way back. King Gunthram’s legend is one of a group

interesting from the same point of view. The king lay in the wood asleep

with his head in his faithful henchman’s lap; the servant saw as it were

a snake issue from his lord’s mouth and run to the brook, but it could

not pass, so the servant laid his sword across the water, and the

creature ran along it and up into a mountain; after a while it came back

and returned into the mouth of the sleeping king, who waking told him

how he had dreamt that he went over an iron bridge into a fountain full

of gold.[672] This is one of those instructive legends which preserve

for us, as in a museum, relics of an early intellectual condition of our

Aryan race, in thoughts which to our modern minds have fallen to the

level of quaint fancy, but which still remain sound and reasonable

philosophy to the savage. A Karen at this day would appreciate every

point of the story; the familiar notion of spirits not crossing water

which he exemplifies in his Burmese forests by stretching threads across

the brook for the ghosts to pass along; the idea of the soul going forth

embodied in an animal; and the theory of the dream being a real journey

of the sleeper’s soul. Finally, this old belief still finds, as such

beliefs so often do, a refuge in modern poetry:

‘Yon child is dreaming far away,

And is not where he seems.’

This opinion, however, only constitutes one of several parts of the

theory of dreams in savage psychology. Another part has also a place

here, the view that human souls come from without to visit the sleeper,

who sees them as dreams. These two views are by no means incompatible.

The North American Indians allowed themselves the alternative of

supposing a dream to be either a visit from the soul of the person or

object dreamt of, or a sight seen by the rational soul, gone out for an

excursion while the sensitive soul remains in the body.[673] So the Zulu

may be visited in a dream by the shade of an ancestor, the itongo, who

comes to warn him of danger, or he may himself be taken by the itongo in

a dream to visit his distant people, and see that they are in trouble;

as for the man who is passing into the morbid condition of the

professional seer, phantoms are continually coming to talk to him in his

sleep, till he becomes, as the expressive native phrase is, ‘a house of

dreams.’[674] In the lower range of culture, it is perhaps most

frequently taken for granted that a man’s apparition in a dream is a

visit from his disembodied spirit, which the dreamer, to use an

expressive Ojibwa idiom, ‘sees when asleep.’ Such a thought comes out

clearly in the Fijian opinion that a living man’s spirit may leave the

body, to trouble other people in their sleep;[675] or in a recent

account of an old Indian woman of British Columbia sending for the

medicine-man to drive away the dead people who came to her every

night.[676] A modern observer’s description of the state of mind of the

negroes of West Africa in this respect is extremely characteristic and

instructive. ‘All their dreams are construed into visits from the

spirits of their deceased friends. The cautions, hints, and warnings

which come to them through this source are received with the most

serious and deferential attention, and are always acted upon in their

waking hours. The habit of relating their dreams, which is universal,

greatly promotes the habit of dreaming itself, and hence their sleeping

hours are characterized by almost as much intercourse with the dead as

their waking are with the living. This is, no doubt, one of the reasons

of their excessive superstitiousness. Their imaginations become so

lively that they can scarcely distinguish between their dreams and their

waking thoughts, between the real and the ideal, and they consequently

utter falsehood without intending, and profess to see things which never

existed.’[677]

To the Greek of old, the dream-soul was what to the modern savage it

still is. Sleep, loosing cares of mind, fell on Achilles as he lay by

the sounding sea, and there stood over him the soul of Patroklos, like

to him altogether in stature, and the beauteous eyes, and the voice, and

the garments that wrapped his skin; he spake, and Achilles stretched out

to grasp him with loving hands, but caught him not, and like a smoke the

soul sped twittering below the earth. Along the ages that separate us

from Homeric times, the apparition in dreams of men living or dead has

been a subject of philosophic speculation and of superstitious

fear.[678] Both the phantom of the living and the ghost of the dead

figure in Cicero’s typical tale. Two Arcadians came to Megara together,

one lodged at a friend’s house, the other at an inn. In the night this

latter appeared to his fellow-traveller, imploring his help, for the

innkeeper was plotting his death; the sleeper sprang up in alarm, but

thinking the vision of no consequence went to sleep again. Then a second

time his companion appeared to him, to entreat that though he had failed

to help, he would at least avenge, for the innkeeper had killed him and

hidden his body in a dung-cart, wherefore he charged his

fellow-traveller to be early next morning at the city-gate before the

cart passed out. Struck with this second dream, the traveller went as

bidden, and there found the cart; the body of the murdered man was in

it, and the innkeeper was brought to justice. ‘Quid hoc somnio dici

potest divinius!’[679] Augustine discusses with reference to the nature

of the soul various dream-stories of his time, where the apparitions of

men dead or living are seen in dreams. In one of the latter he himself

figured, for when a disciple of his, Eulogius the rhetor of Carthage,

once could not get to sleep for thinking of an obscure passage in

Cicero’s Rhetoric, that night Augustine came to him in a dream and

explained it. But Augustine’s tendency was toward the modern theory of

dreams, and in this case he says it was certainly his image that

appeared, not himself, who was far across the sea, neither knowing nor

caring about the matter.[680] As we survey the immense series of

dream-stories of similar types in patristic, mediæval, and modern

literature, we may find it difficult enough to decide which are truth

and which are fiction. But along the course of these myriad narratives

of human phantoms appearing in dreams to cheer or torment, to warn or

inform, or to demand fulfilment of their own desires, the problem of

dream-apparitions may be traced in progress of gradual determination,

from the earlier conviction that a disembodied soul really comes into

the presence of the sleeper, toward the later opinion that such a

phantasm is produced in the dreamer’s mind without the perception of any

external objective figure.

The evidence of visions corresponds with the evidence of dreams in their

bearing on primitive theories of the soul,[681] and the two classes of

phenomena substantiate and supplement one another. Even in healthy

waking life, the savage or barbarian has never learnt to make that rigid

distinction between subjective and objective, between imagination and

reality, to enforce which is one of the main results of scientific

education. Still less, when disordered in body and mind he sees around

him phantom human forms, can he distrust the evidence of his very

senses. Thus it comes to pass that throughout the lower civilization men

believe, with the most vivid and intense belief, in the objective

reality of the human spectres which they see in sickness, exhaustion, or

excitement. As will be hereafter noticed, one main reason of the

practices of fasting, penance, narcotising by drugs, and other means of

bringing on morbid exaltation, is that the patients may obtain the sight

of spectral beings, from whom they look to gain spiritual knowledge and

even worldly power. Human ghosts are among the principal of these

phantasmal figures. There is no doubt that honest visionaries describe

ghosts as they really appear to their perception, while even the

impostors who pretend to see them conform to the descriptions thus

established; thus, in West Africa, a man’s _kla_ or soul, becoming at

his death a _sisa_ or ghost, can remain in the house with the corpse,

but is only visible to the wong-man, the spirit-doctor.[682] Sometimes

the phantom has the characteristic quality of not being visible to all

of an assembled company. Thus the natives of the Antilles believed that

the dead appeared on the roads when one went alone, but not when many

went together;[683] thus among the Finns the ghosts of the dead were to

be seen by the shamans, but not by men generally unless in dreams.[684]

Such is perhaps the meaning of the description of Samuel’s ghost,

visible to the witch of Endor, but not to Saul, for he has to ask her

what it is she sees.[685] Yet this test of the nature of an apparition

is one which easily breaks down. We know well how in civilized countries

a current rumour of some one having seen a phantom is enough to bring a

sight of it to others whose minds are in a properly receptive state. The

condition of the modern ghost-seer, whose imagination passes on such

slight excitement into positive hallucination is rather the rule than

the exception among uncultured and intensely imaginative tribes, whose

minds may be thrown off their balance by a touch, a word, a gesture, an

unaccustomed noise. Among savage tribes, however, as among civilized

races who have inherited remains of early philosophy formed under

similar conditions, the doctrine of visibility or invisibility of

phantoms has been obviously shaped with reference to actual experience.

To declare that souls or ghosts are necessarily either visible or

invisible, would directly contradict the evidence of men’s senses. But

to assert or imply, as the lower races do, that they are visible

sometimes and to some persons, but not always or to every one, is to lay

down an explanation of facts which is not indeed our usual modern

explanation, but which is a perfectly rational and intelligible product

of early science.

Without discussing on their merits the accounts of what is called

‘second sight,’ it may be pointed out that they are related among savage

tribes, as when Captain Jonathan Carver obtained from a Cree

medicine-man a true prophecy of the arrival of a canoe with news next

day at noon; or when Mr. J. Mason Brown, travelling with two voyageurs

on the Coppermine River, was met by Indians of the very band he was

seeking, these having been sent by their medicine-man, who, on enquiry,

stated that ‘He saw them coming, and heard them talk on their

journey.’[686] These are analogous to accounts of the Highland

second-sight, as when Pennant heard of a gentleman of the Hebrides, said

to have the convenient gift of foreseeing visitors in time to get ready

for them, or when Dr. Johnson was told by another laird that a labouring

man of his had predicted his return to the island, and described the

peculiar livery his servant had been newly dressed in.[687]

As a general rule, people are apt to consider it impossible for a man to

be in two places at once, and indeed a saying to that effect has become

a popular saw. But the rule is so far from being universally accepted,

that the word ‘bilocation’ has been invented to express the miraculous

faculty possessed by certain Saints of the Roman Church, of being in two

places at once; like St. Alfonso di Liguori, who had the useful power of

preaching his sermon in church while he was confessing penitents at

home.[688] The reception and explanation of these various classes of

stories fit perfectly with the primitive animistic theory of

apparitions, and the same is true of the following most numerous class

of the second-sight narratives.

Death is the event which, in all stages of culture, brings thought to

bear most intensely, though not always most healthily, on the problems

of psychology. The apparition of the disembodied soul has in all ages

been thought to bear especial relation to its departure from its body at

death. This is well shown by the reception not only of a theory of

ghosts, but of a special doctrine of ‘wraiths’ or ‘fetches.’ Thus the

Karens say that a man’s spirit, appearing after death, may thus announce

it.[689] In New Zealand it is ominous to see the figure of an absent

person, for if it be shadowy and the face not visible, his death may ere

long be expected, but if the face be seen he is dead already. A party of

Maoris (one of whom told the story) were seated round a fire in the open

air, when there appeared, seen only by two of them, the figure of a

relative left ill at home; they exclaimed, the figure vanished, and on

the return of the party it appeared that the sick man had died about the

time of the vision.[690] Examining the position of the doctrine of

wraiths among the higher races, we find it especially prominent in three

intellectual districts, Christian hagiology, popular folklore, and

modern spiritualism. St. Anthony saw the soul of St. Ammonius carried to

heaven in the midst of choirs of angels, the same day that the holy

hermit died five days’ journey off in the desert of Nitria; when St.

Ambrose died on Easter Eve, several newly-baptized children saw the holy

bishop, and pointed him out to their parents, but these with their less

pure eyes could not behold him; and so forth.[691] Folklore examples

abound in Silesia and the Tyrol, where the gift of wraith-seeing still

flourishes, with the customary details of funerals, churches,

four-cross-roads, and headless phantoms, and an especial association

with New Year’s Eve. The accounts of ‘second-sight’ from North Britain

mostly belong to a somewhat older date. Thus the St. Kilda people used

to be haunted by their own spectral doubles, forerunners of impending

death, and in 1799 a traveller writes of the peasants of

Kirkcudbrightshire, ‘It is common among them to fancy that they see the

wraiths of persons dying, which will be visible to one and not to others

present with him. Within these last twenty years, it was hardly possible

to meet with any person who had not seen many wraiths and ghosts in the

course of his experience.’ Those who discuss the authenticity of the

second-sight stories as actual evidence, must bear in mind that they

prove a little too much; they vouch not only for human apparitions, but

for such phantoms as demon-dogs, and for still more fanciful symbolic

omens. Thus a phantom shroud seen in spiritual vision on a living man

predicts his death, immediate if it is up to his head, less nearly

approaching if it is only up to his waist; and to see in spiritual

vision a spark of fire fall upon a person’s arm or breast, is a

forerunner of a dead child to be seen in his arms.[692] As visionaries

often see phantoms of living persons without any remarkable event

coinciding with their hallucinations, it is naturally admitted that a

man’s phantom or ‘double’ may be seen without portending anything in

particular. The spiritualistic theory specially insists on cases of

apparition where the person’s death corresponds more or less nearly with

the time when some friend perceives his phantom.[693] Narratives of this

class, which I can here only specify without arguing on them, are

abundantly in circulation. Thus, I have an account by a lady, who ‘saw,

as it were, the form of some one laid out,’ near the time when a brother

died at Melbourne, and who mentions another lady known to her, who

thought she saw her own father look in at the church window at the

moment he was dying in his own house. Another account is sent me by a

Shetland lady, who relates that about twenty years ago she and a girl

leading her pony recognized the familiar figure of one Peter Sutherland,

whom they knew to be at the time in ill-health in Edinburgh; he turned a

corner and they saw no more of him, but next week came the news of his

sudden death.

That the apparitional human soul bears the likeness of its fleshly body,

is the principle implicitly accepted by all who believe it really and

objectively present in dreams and visions. My own view is that nothing

but dreams and visions could have ever put into men’s minds such an idea

as that of souls being ethereal images of bodies. It is thus habitually

taken for granted in animistic philosophy, savage or civilized, that

souls set free from the earthly body are recognized by a likeness to it

which they still retain, whether as ghostly wanderers on earth or

inhabitants of the world beyond the grave. Man’s spirit, says

Swedenborg, is his mind, which lives after death in complete human form,

and this is the poet’s dictum in ‘In Memoriam:’

‘Eternal form shall still divide

The eternal soul from all beside;

And I shall know him when we meet.’

This world-wide thought, coming into view here in a multitude of cases

from all grades of culture, needs no collection of ordinary instances to

illustrate it.[694] But a quaint and special group of beliefs will serve

to display the thoroughness with which the soul is thus conceived as an

image of the body. As a consistent corollary to such an opinion, it is

argued that the mutilation of the body will have a corresponding effect

upon the soul, and very low savage races have philosophy enough to work

out this idea. Thus it was recorded of the Indians of Brazil by one of

the early European visitors, that they ‘believe that the dead arrive in

the other world wounded or hacked to pieces, in fact just as they left

this.’[695] Thus, too, the Australian who has slain his enemy will cut

off the right thumb of the corpse, so that although the spirit will

become a hostile ghost, it cannot throw with its mutilated hand the

shadowy spear, and may be safely left to wander, malignant but

harmless.[696] The negro fears long sickness before death, such as will

send him lean and feeble into the next world. His theory of the

mutilation of soul with body could not be brought more vividly into view

than in that ugly story of the West Indian planter, whose slaves began

to seek in suicide at once relief from present misery and restoration to

their native land; but the white man was too cunning for them, he cut

off the heads and hands of the corpses, and the survivors saw that not

even death could save them from a master who could maim their very souls

in the next world.[697] The same rude and primitive belief continues

among nations risen far higher in intellectual rank. The Chinese hold in

especial horror the punishment of decapitation, considering that he who

quits this world lacking a member will so arrive in the next, and a case

is recorded lately of a criminal at Amoy who for this reason begged to

die instead by the cruel death of crucifixion, and was crucified

accordingly.[698] The series ends as usual in the folklore of the

civilized world. The phantom skeleton in chains that haunted the house

at Bologna, showed the way to the garden where was buried the real

chained fleshless skeleton it belonged to, and came no more when the

remains had been duly buried. When the Earl of Cornwall met the fetch of

his friend William Rufus carried black and naked on a black goat across

the Bodmin moors, he saw that it was wounded through the midst of the

breast; and afterwards he heard that at that very hour the king had been

slain in the New Forest by the arrow of Walter Tirell.[699]

In studying the nature of the soul as conceived among the lower races,

and in tracing such conceptions onward among the higher, circumstantial

details are available. It is as widely recognized among mankind that

souls or ghosts have voices, as that they have visible forms, and indeed

the evidence for both is of the same nature. Men who perceive evidently

that souls do talk when they present themselves in dream or vision,

naturally take for granted at once the objective reality of the ghostly

voice, and of the ghostly form from which it proceeds. This is involved

in the series of narratives of spiritual communications with living men,

from savagery onward to civilization, while the more modern doctrine of

the subjectivity of such phenomena recognizes the phenomena themselves,

but offers a different explanation of them. One special conception,

however, requires particular notice. This defines the spirit-voice as

being a low murmur, chirp, or whistle, as it were the ghost of a voice.

The Algonquin Indians of North America could hear the shadow-souls of

the dead chirp like crickets.[700] The divine spirits of the New Zealand

dead, coming to converse with the living, utter their words in whistling

tones, and such utterances by a squeaking noise are mentioned elsewhere

in Polynesia.[701] The Zulu diviner’s familiar spirits are ancestral

manes, who talk in a low whistling tone short of a full whistle, whence

they have their name of ‘imilozi’ or whistlers.[702] These ideas

correspond with classic descriptions of the ghostly voice, as a ‘twitter

or ‘thin murmur:’

Ψυχὴ δὲ κατὰ χθονὸς ἠύτε καπνὸς,

Ψχετο τετριγυία.’[703]

‘Umbra cruenta Remi visa est assistere lecto,

Atque haec exiguo murmure verba loqui.’[704]

As the attributes of the soul or ghost extend to other spiritual beings,

and the utterances of such are to a great extent given by the voice of

mediums, we connect these accounts with the notion that the language of

demons is also a low whistle or mutter, whence the well-known practice

of whispering or murmuring charms, the ‘susurrus necromanticus’ of

sorcerers, to whom the already cited description of ‘wizards that peep

(i.e. chirp) and mutter’ is widely applicable.[705]

The conception of dreams and visions as caused by present objective

figures, and the identification of such phantom souls with the shadow

and the breath, has led to the treatment of souls as substantial

material beings. Thus it is a usual proceeding to make openings through

solid materials to allow souls to pass. The Iroquois in old times used

to leave an opening in the grave for the lingering soul to visit its

body, and some of them still bore holes in the coffin for the same

purpose.[706] The Malagasy sorcerer, for the cure of a sick man who had

lost his soul, would make a hole in a burial-house to let out a spirit

which he would catch in his cap and so convey to the patient’s

head.[707] The Chinese make a hole in the roof to let out the soul at

death.[708] And lastly, the custom of opening a window or door for the

departing soul when it quits the body is to this day a very familiar

superstition in France, Germany, and England.[709] Again, the souls of

the dead are thought susceptible of being beaten, hurt and driven like

any other living creatures. Thus the Queensland aborigines would beat

the air in an annual mock fight, held to scare away the souls that death

had let loose among the living since last year.[710] Thus North American

Indians, when they had tortured an enemy to death, ran about crying and

beating with sticks to scare the ghost away; they have been known to set

nets round their cabins to catch and keep out neighbours’ departed

souls; fancying the soul of a dying man to go out at the wigwam roof,

they would habitually beat the sides with sticks to drive it forth; we

even hear of the widow going off from her husband’s funeral followed by

a person flourishing a handful of twigs about her head like a

flyflapper, to drive off her husband’s ghost and leave her free to marry

again.[711] With a kindlier feeling, the Congo negroes abstained for a

whole year after a death from sweeping the house, lest the dust should

injure the delicate substance of the ghost;[712] the Tonquinese avoided

house-cleaning during the festival when the souls of the dead came back

to their houses for the New Year’s visit;[713] and it seems likely that

the special profession of the Roman ‘everriatores’ who swept the houses

out after a funeral, was connected with a similar idea.[714] To this

day, it remains a German peasants’ saying that it is wrong to slam a

door, lest one should pinch a soul in it.[715] The not uncommon practice

of strewing ashes to show the footprints of ghosts or demons takes for

granted that they are substantial bodies. In the literature of animism,

extreme tests of the weight of ghosts are now and then forthcoming. They

range from the declaration of a Basuto diviner that the late queen had

been bestriding his shoulders, and he never felt such a weight in his

life, to Glanvil’s story of David Hunter the neat-herd, who lifted up

the old woman’s ghost, and she felt just like a bag of feathers in his

arms, or the pathetic German superstition that the dead mother’s coming

back in the night to suckle the baby she has left on earth, may be known

by the hollow pressed down in the bed where she lay, and at last down to

the alleged modern spiritualistic reckoning of the weight of a human

soul at from 3 to 4 ounces.[716]

Explicit statements as to the substance of soul are to be found both

among low and high races, in an instructive series of definitions. The

Tongans imagined the human soul to be the finer or more aeriform part of

the body, which leaves it suddenly at the moment of death; something

comparable to the perfume and essence of a flower as related to the more

solid vegetable fibre.[717] The Greenland seers described the soul as

they habitually perceived it in their visions; it is pale and soft, they

said, and he who tries to seize it feels nothing, for it has no flesh

nor bone nor sinew.[718] The Caribs did not think the soul so immaterial

as to be invisible, but said it was subtle and thin like a purified

body.[719] Turning to higher races, we may take the Siamese as an

example of a people who conceive of souls as consisting of subtle matter

escaping sight and touch, or as united to a swiftly moving aerial

body.[720] In the classic world, it is recorded as an opinion of

Epicurus that ‘they who say the soul is incorporeal talk folly, for it

could neither do nor suffer anything were it such.’[721] Among the

Fathers, Irenæus describes souls as incorporeal in comparison with

mortal bodies,[722] and Tertullian relates a vision or revelation of a

certain Montanist prophetess, of the soul seen by her corporeally, thin

and lucid, aerial in colour and human in form.[723] For an example of

mediæval doctrine, may be cited a 14th-century English poem, the

‘Ayenbite of Inwyt’ (i.e. ‘Remorse of Conscience’) which points out how

the soul, by reason of the thinness of its substance, suffers all the

more in purgatory:

‘The soul is more tendre and nesche

Than the bodi that hath bones and fleysche;

Thanne the soul that is so tendere of kinde,

Mote nedis hure penaunce hardere y-finde,

Than eni bodi that evere on live was.’[724]

The doctrine of the ethereal soul passed on into more modern philosophy,

and the European peasant holds fast to it still; as Wuttke says, the

ghosts of the dead have to him a misty and evanescent materiality, for

they have bodies as we have, though of other kind: they can eat and

drink, they can be wounded and killed.[725] Nor was the ancient doctrine

ever more distinctly stated than by a modern spiritualistic writer, who

observes that ‘a spirit is no immaterial substance; on the contrary, the

spiritual organization is composed of matter ... in a very high state of

refinement and attenuation.’[726]

Among rude races, the original conception of the human soul seems to

have been that of ethereality, or vaporous materiality, which has held

so large a place in human thought ever since. In fact, the later

metaphysical notion of immateriality could scarcely have conveyed any

meaning to a savage. It is moreover to be noticed that, as to the whole

nature and action of apparitional souls, the lower philosophy escapes

various difficulties which down to modern times have perplexed

metaphysicians and theologians of the civilized world. Considering the

thin ethereal body of the soul to be itself sufficient and suitable for

visibility, movement, and speech, the primitive animists required no

additional hypotheses to account for these manifestations; they had no

place for theories such as detailed by Calmet, as that immaterial souls

have their own vaporous bodies, or occasionally have such vaporous

bodies provided for them by supernatural means to enable them to appear

as spectres, or that they possess the power of condensing the

circumambient air into phantom-like bodies to invest themselves in, or

of forming from it vocal instruments.[727] It appears to have been

within systematic schools of civilized philosophy that the

transcendental definitions of the immaterial soul were obtained, by

abstraction from the primitive conception of the ethereal-material soul,

so as to reduce it from a physical to a metaphysical entity.

Departing from the body at the time of death, the soul or spirit is

considered set free to linger near the tomb, to wander on earth or flit

in the air, or to travel to the proper region of spirits—the world

beyond the grave. The principal conceptions of the lower psychology as

to a Future Life will be considered in the following chapters, but for

the present purpose of investigating the theory of souls in general, it

will be well to enter here upon one department of the subject. Men do

not stop short at the persuasion that death releases the soul to a free

and active existence, but they quite logically proceed to assist nature,

by slaying men in order to liberate their souls for ghostly uses. Thus

there arises one of the most widespread, distinct, and intelligible

rites of animistic religion—that of funeral human sacrifice for the

service of the dead. When a man of rank dies and his soul departs to its

own place, wherever and whatever that place may be, it is a rational

inference of early philosophy that the souls of attendants, slaves, and

wives, put to death at his funeral, will make the same journey and

continue their service in the next life, and the argument is frequently

stretched further, to include the souls of new victims sacrificed in

order that they may enter upon the same ghostly servitude. It will

appear from the ethnography of this rite that it is not strongly marked

in the very lowest levels of culture, but that, arising in the lower

barbaric stage, it develops itself in the higher, and thenceforth

continues or dwindles in survival.

Of the murderous practices to which this opinion leads, remarkably

distinct accounts may be cited from among tribes of the Indian

Archipelago. The following account is given of the funerals of great men

among the rude Kayans of Borneo:—‘Slaves are killed in order that they

may follow the deceased and attend upon him. Before they are killed the

relations who surround them enjoin them to take great care of their

master when they join him, to watch and shampoo him when he is

indisposed, to be always near him, and to obey all his behests. The

female relatives of the deceased then take a spear and slightly wound

the victims, after which the males spear them to death.’ Again, the

opinion of the Idaan is ‘that all whom they kill in this world shall

attend them as slaves after death. This notion of future interest in the

destruction of the human species is a great impediment to an intercourse

with them, as murder goes farther than present advantage or resentment.

From the same principle they will purchase a slave, guilty of any

capital crime, at fourfold his value, that they may be his

executioners.’ With the same idea is connected the ferocious custom of

‘head-hunting,’ so prevalent among the Dayaks before Rajah Brooke’s

time. They considered that the owner of every human head they could

procure would serve them in the next world, where, indeed, a man’s rank

would be according to his number of heads in this. They would continue

the mourning for a dead man till a head was brought in, to provide him

with a slave to accompany him to the ‘habitation of souls;’ a father who

lost his child would go out and kill the first man he met, as a funeral

ceremony; a young man might not marry till he had procured a head, and

some tribes would bury with a dead man the first head he had taken,

together with spears, cloth, rice, and betel. Waylaying and murdering

men for their heads became, in fact, the Dayaks’ national sport, and

they remarked ‘the white men read books, we hunt for heads

instead.’[728] Of such rites in the Pacific islands, the most hideously

purposeful accounts reach us from the Fiji group. Till lately, a main

part of the ceremony of a great man’s funeral was the strangling of

wives, friends, and slaves, for the distinct purpose of attending him

into the world of spirits. Ordinarily the first victim was the wife of

the deceased, and more than one if he had several, and their corpses,

oiled as for a feast, clothed with new fringed girdles, with heads

dressed and ornamented, and vermilion and turmeric powder spread on

their faces and bosoms, were laid by the side of the dead warrior.

Associates and inferior attendants were likewise slain, and these bodies

were spoken of as ‘grass for bedding the grave.’ When Ra Mbithi, the

pride of Somosomo, was lost at sea, seventeen of his wives were killed;

and after the news of the massacre of the Namena people, in 1839, eighty

women were strangled to accompany the spirits of their murdered

husbands. Such sacrifices took place under the same pressure of public

opinion which kept up the widow-burning in modern India. The Fijian

widow was worked upon by her relatives with all the pressure of

persuasion and of menace; she understood well that life to her

henceforth would mean a wretched existence of neglect, disgrace, and

destitution; and tyrannous custom, as hard to struggle against in the

savage as in the civilized world, drove her to the grave. Thus, far from

resisting, she became importunate for death, and the new life to come,

and till public opinion reached a more enlightened state, the

missionaries often used their influence in vain to save from the

strangling-cord some wife whom they could have rescued, but who herself

refused to live. So repugnant to the native mind was the idea of a

chieftain going unattended into the other world, that the missionaries’

prohibition of the cherished custom was one reason of the popular

dislike to Christianity. Many of the nominal Christians, when once a

chief of theirs was shot from an ambush, esteemed it most fortunate that

a stray shot at the same time killed a young man at a distance from him,

and thus provided a companion for the spirit of the slain chief.[729]

In America, the funeral human sacrifice makes its characteristic

appearance. A good example may be taken from among the Osages, whose

habit was sometimes to plant in the cairn raised over a corpse a pole

with an enemy’s scalp hanging to the top. Their notion was that by

taking an enemy and suspending his scalp over the grave of a deceased

friend, the spirit of the victim became subjected to the spirit of the

buried warrior in the land of spirits. Hence the last and best service

that could be performed for a deceased relative was to take an enemy’s

life, and thus transmit it by his scalp.[730] The correspondence of this

idea with that just mentioned among the Dayaks is very striking. With a

similar intention, the Caribs would slay on the dead master’s grave any

of his slaves they could lay hands on.[731] Among the native peoples

risen to considerably higher grades of social and political life, these

practices were not suppressed but exaggerated, in the ghastly sacrifices

of warriors, slaves, and wives, who departed to continue their duteous

offices at the funeral of the chief or monarch in Central America[732]

and Mexico,[733] in Bogota[734] and Peru.[735] It is interesting to

notice, in somewhat favourable contrast with these customs of

comparatively cultured American nations, the practice of certain rude

tribes of the North-West. The Quakeolths, for instance, did not actually

sacrifice the widow, but they made her rest her head on her husband’s

corpse while it was being burned, until at last she was dragged more

dead than alive from the flames; if she recovered, she collected her

husband’s ashes and carried them about with her for three years, during

which any levity or deficiency of grief would render her an outcast.

This looks like a mitigated survival from an earlier custom of actual

widow-burning.[736]

Of such funeral rites, carried out to the death, graphic and horrid

descriptions are recorded in the countries across Africa—East, Central,

and West. A headman of the Wadoe is buried sitting in a shallow pit, and

with the corpse a male and female slave alive, he with a bill-hook in

his hand to cut fuel for his lord in the death-world, she seated on a

little stool with the dead chief’s head in her lap. A chief of Unyamwezi

is entombed in a vaulted pit, sitting on a low stool with a bow in his

right hand, and provided with a pot of native beer; with him are shut in

alive three women slaves, and the ceremony is concluded with a libation

of beer on the earth heaped up above them all. The same idea which in

Guinea makes it common for the living to send messages by the dying to

the dead, is developed in Ashanti and Dahome into a monstrous system of

massacre. The King of Dahome must enter Deadland with a ghostly court of

hundreds of wives, eunuchs, singers, drummers, and soldiers. Nor is this

all. Captain Burton thus describes the yearly ‘Customs:’—‘They

periodically supply the departed monarch with fresh attendants in the

shadowy world. For unhappily these murderous scenes are an expression,

lamentably mistaken but perfectly sincere, of the liveliest filial

piety.’ Even this annual slaughter must be supplemented by almost daily

murder:—‘Whatever action, however trivial, is performed by the King, it

must dutifully be reported to his sire in the shadowy realm. A victim,

almost always a war-captive, is chosen; the message is delivered to him,

an intoxicating draught of rum follows it, and he is dispatched to Hades

in the best of humours.’[737] In southern districts of Africa, accounts

of the same class begin in Congo and Angola with the recorded slaying of

the dead man’s favourite wives, to live with him in the other world, a

practice still in vogue among the Chevas of the Zambesi district, and

formerly known among the Maravis; while the funeral sacrifice of

attendants with a chief is a thing of the past among the Barotse, as

among the Zulus, who yet have not forgotten the days when the chief’s

servants and attendant warriors were cast into the fire which had

consumed his body, that they might go with him, and prepare things

beforehand, and get food for him.[738]

If now we turn to the records of Asia and Europe, we shall find the

sacrifice of attendants for the dead widely prevalent in both continents

in old times, while in the east its course may be traced continuing

onward to our own day. The two Mohammedans who travelled in Southern

Asia in the ninth century relate that on the accession of certain kings

a quantity of rice is prepared, which is eaten by some three or four

hundred men, who present themselves voluntarily to share it, thereby

undertaking to burn themselves at the monarch’s death. With this

corresponds Marco Polo’s thirteenth-century account in Southern India of

the king of Maabar’s guard of horsemen, who, when he dies and his body

is burnt, throw themselves into the fire to do him service in the next

world.[739] In the seventeenth century the practice is described as

still prevailing in Japan, where, on the death of a nobleman, from ten

to thirty of his servants put themselves to death by the ‘hara kari,’ or

ripping-up, having indeed engaged during his lifetime, by the solemn

compact of drinking wine together, to give their bodies to their lord at

his death. Yet already in ancient times such funeral sacrifices were

passing into survival, when the servants who followed their master in

death were replaced by clay images set up at the tomb.[740] Among the

Ossetes of the Caucasus, an interesting relic of widow-sacrifice is

still kept up: the dead man’s widow and his saddle-horse are led thrice

round the grave, and no man may marry the widow or mount the horse thus

devoted.[741] In China, legend preserves the memory of the ancient

funeral human sacrifice. The brother of Chin Yang, a disciple of

Confucius, died, and his widow and steward wished to bury some living

persons with him, to serve him in the regions below. Thereupon the sage

suggested that the proper victims would be the widow and steward

themselves, but this not precisely meeting their views, the matter

dropped, and the deceased was interred without attendants. This story at

least shows the rite to have been not only known but understood in China

long ago. In modern China, the suicide of widows to accompany their

husbands is a recognized practice, sometimes even performed in public.

Moreover, the ceremonies of providing sedan-bearers and an

umbrella-bearer for the dead, and sending mounted horsemen to announce

beforehand his arrival to the authorities of Hades, although these

bearers and messengers are only made of paper and burnt, seem to

represent survivals of a more murderous reality.[742]

The Aryan race gives striking examples of the rite of funeral human

sacrifice in its sternest shape, whether in history or in myth, that

records as truly as history the manners of old days.[743] The episodes

of the Trojan captives laid with the horses and hounds on the funeral

pile of Patroklos, and of Evadne throwing herself into the funeral pile

of her husband, and Pausanias’s narrative of the suicide of the three

Messenian widows, are among its Greek representatives.[744] In

Scandinavian myth, Baldr is burnt with his dwarf foot-page, his horse

and saddle; Brynhild lies on the pile by her beloved Sigurd, and men and

maids follow after them on the hell-way.[745] The Gauls in Cæsar’s time

burned at the dead man’s sumptuous funeral whatever was dear to him,

animals also, and much-loved slaves and clients.[746] Old mentions of

Slavonic heathendom describe the burning of the dead with clothing and

weapons, horses and hounds, with faithful servants, and above all, with

wives. Thus St. Boniface says that ‘the Wends keep matrimonial love with

so great zeal, that the wife may refuse to survive her husband, and she

is held praiseworthy among women who slays herself by her own hand, that

she may be burnt on one pyre with her lord.’[747] This Aryan rite of

widow-sacrifice has not only an ethnographic and antiquarian interest,

but even a place in modern politics. In Brahmanic India the widow of a

Hindu of the Brahman or the Kshatriya caste was burnt on the funeral

pile with her husband, as a _satî_ or ‘good woman,’ which word has

passed into English as _suttee_. Mentioned in classic and mediæval

times, the practice was in full vigour at the beginning of the last

century.[748] Often one dead husband took many wives with him. Some went

willingly and gaily to the new life, many were driven by force of

custom, by fear of disgrace, by family persuasion, by priestly threats

and promises, by sheer violence. When the rite was suppressed under

modern British rule, the priesthood resisted to the uttermost, appealing

to the Veda, as sanctioning the ordinance, and demanding that the

foreign rulers should respect it. Yet in fact, as Prof. H. H. Wilson

proved, the priests had actually falsified their sacred Veda in support

of a rite enjoined by long and inveterate prejudice, but not by the

traditional standards of Hindu faith. The ancient Brahmanic funeral

rites have been minutely detailed from the Sanskrit authorities in an

essay by Prof. Max Müller. Their directions are that the widow is to be

set on the funeral pile with her husband’s corpse, and if he be a

warrior his bow is to be placed there too. But then a brother-in-law or

adopted child or old servant is to lead the widow down again at the

summons, ‘Rise, woman, come to the world of life; thou sleepest nigh

unto him whose life is gone. Come to us. Thou hast thus fulfilled thy

duties of a wife to the husband who once took thy hand, and made thee a

mother.’ The bow, however, is to be broken and thrown back upon the

pile, and the dead man’s sacrificial instruments are to be laid with him

and really consumed. While admitting that the modern ordinance of

Suttee-burning is a corrupt departure from the early Brahmanic ritual,

we may nevertheless find reason to consider the practice as not a new

invention by the later Hindu priesthood, but as the revival, under

congenial influences, of an ancient Aryan rite belonging originally to a

period even earlier than the Veda. The ancient authorized ceremony looks

as though, in a primitive form of the rite, the widow had been actually

sent with the dead, for which real sacrifice a humaner law substituted a

mere pretence. This view is supported by the existence of an old and

express prohibition of the wife being sacrificed, a prohibition

seemingly directed against a real custom, ‘to follow the dead husband is

prohibited, so says the law of the Brahmans. With regard to the other

castes this law for women may be or may not be.’[749] To treat the Hindu

widow-burning as a case of survival and revival seems to me most in

accordance with a general ethnographic view of the subject.

Widow-sacrifice is found in various regions of the world under a low

state of civilization, and this fits with the hypothesis of its having

belonged to the Aryan race while yet in an early and barbarous

condition. Thus the prevalence of a rite of suttee like that of modern

India among ancient Aryan nations settled in Europe, Greeks,

Scandinavians, Germans, Slaves, may be simply accounted for by direct

inheritance from the remote common antiquity of them all. If this theory

be sound, it will follow that ancient as the Vedic ordinances may be,

they represent in this matter a reform and a reaction against a yet more

ancient barbaric rite of widow-sacrifice, which they prohibited in fact,

but yet kept up in symbol. The history of religion displays but too

plainly the proneness of mankind to relapse, in spite of reformation,

into the lower and darker condition of the past. Stronger and more

tenacious than even Vedic authority, the hideous custom of the suttee

may have outlived an attempt to suppress it in early Brahmanic times,

and the English rulers, in abolishing it, may have abolished a relic not

merely of degenerate Hinduism, but of the far more remotely ancient

savagery out of which the Aryan civilization had grown.