In now passing from the consideration of_Primitive culture, vol. 1 (of 2)

souls of the lower animals, we have first to inform ourselves as to the

savage man’s idea, which is very different from the civilized man’s, of

the nature of these lower animals. A remarkable group of observances

customary among rude tribes will bring this distinction sharply into

view. Savages talk quite seriously to beasts alive or dead as they would

to men alive or dead, offer them homage, ask pardon when it is their

painful duty to hunt and kill them. A North American Indian will reason

with a horse as if rational. Some will spare the rattlesnake, fearing

the vengeance of its spirit if slain; others will salute the creature

reverently, bid it welcome as a friend from the land of spirits,

sprinkle a pinch of tobacco on its head for an offering, catch it by the

tail and dispatch it with extreme dexterity, and carry off its skin as a

trophy. If an Indian is attacked and torn by a bear, it is that the

beast fell upon him intentionally in anger, perhaps to revenge the hurt

done to another bear. When a bear is killed, they will beg pardon of

him, or even make him condone the offence by smoking the peace-pipe with

his murderers, who put the pipe in his mouth and blow down it, begging

his spirit not to take revenge.[750] So in Africa, the Kafirs will hunt

the elephant, begging him not to tread on them and kill them, and when

he is dead they will assure him that they did not kill him on purpose,

and they will bury his trunk, for the elephant is a mighty chief, and

his trunk is his hand that he may hurt withal. The Congo people will

even avenge such a murder by a pretended attack on the hunters who did

the deed.[751] Such customs are common among the lower Asiatic tribes.

The Stiens of Kambodia ask pardon of the beast they have killed;[752]

the Ainos of Yesso kill the bear, offer obeisance and salutation to him,

and cut up his carcase.[753] The Koriaks, if they have slain a bear or

wolf, will flay him, dress one of their people in the skin, and dance

round him, chanting excuses that they did not do it, and especially

laying the blame on a Russian. But if it is a fox, they take his skin,

wrap his dead body in hay, and sneering tell him to go to his own people

and say what famous hospitality he has had, and how they gave him a new

coat instead of his old one.[754] The Samoyeds excuse themselves to the

slain bear, telling him it was the Russians who did it, and that a

Russian knife will cut him up.[755] The Goldi will set up the slain

bear, call him ‘my lord’ and do ironical homage to him, or taking him

alive will fatten him in a cage, call him ‘son’ and ‘brother,’ and kill

and eat him as a sacrifice at a solemn festival.[756] In Borneo, the

Dayaks, when they have caught an alligator with a baited hook and rope,

address him with respect and soothing till they have his legs fast, and

then mocking call him ‘rajah’ and ‘grandfather.’[757] Thus when the

savage gets over his fears, he still keeps up in ironical merriment the

reverence which had its origin in trembling sincerity. Even now the

Norse hunter will say with horror of a bear that will attack man, that

he can be ‘no Christian bear.’

The sense of an absolute psychical distinction between man and beast, so

prevalent in the civilized world, is hardly to be found among the lower

races. Men to whom the cries of beasts and birds seem like human

language, and their actions guided as it were by human thought,

logically enough allow the existence of souls to beasts, birds, and

reptiles, as to men. The lower psychology cannot but recognize in beasts

the very characteristics which it attributes to the human soul, namely,

the phenomena of life and death, will and judgment, and the phantom seen

in vision or in dream. As for believers, savage or civilized, in the

great doctrine of metempsychosis, these not only consider that an animal

may have a soul, but that this soul may have inhabited a human being,

and thus the creature may be in fact their own ancestor or once familiar

friend. A line of facts, arranged as waymarks along the course of

civilization, will serve to indicate the history of opinion from

savagery onward, as to the souls of animals during life and after death.

North American Indians held every animal to have its spirit, and these

spirits their future life; the soul of the Canadian dog went to serve

his master in the other world; among the Sioux, the prerogative of

having four souls was not confined to man, but belonged also to the

bear, the most human of animals.[758] The Greenlanders considered that a

sick human soul might be replaced by the sorcerer with a fresh healthy

soul of a hare, a reindeer, or a young child.[759] Maori tale-tellers

have heard of the road by which the spirits of dogs descend to Reinga,

the Hades of the departed; the Hovas of Madagascar know that the ghosts

of beasts and men, dwelling in a great mountain in the south called

Ambondrombe, come out occasionally to walk among the tombs or

execution-places of criminals.[760] The Kamchadals held that every

creature, even the smallest fly, would live again in the

under-world.[761] The Kukis of Assam think that the ghost of every

animal a Kuki kills in the chase or for the feast will belong to him in

the next life, even as the enemy he slays in the field will then become

his slave. The Karens apply the doctrine of the spirit or personal

life-phantom, which is apt to wander from the body and thus suffer

injury, equally to men and to animals.[762] The Zulus say the cattle

they kill come to life again, and become the property of the dwellers in

the world beneath.[763] The Siamese butcher, when in defiance of the

very principles of his Buddhism he slaughters an ox, before he kills the

creature has at least the grace to beseech its spirit to seek a happier

abode.[764] In connexion with such transmigration, Pythagorean and

Platonic philosophy gives to the lower animals undying souls, while

other classic opinion may recognize in beasts only an inferior order of

soul, only the ‘anima’ but not the human ‘animus’ besides. Thus Juvenal:

‘Principio indulsit communis conditor illis

Tantum animas; nobis animum quoque....’[765]

Through the middle ages, controversy as to the psychology of brutes has

lasted on into our own times, ranging between two extremes; on the one

the theory of Descartes which reduced animals to mere machines, on the

other what Mr. Alger defines as ‘the faith that animals have immaterial

and deathless souls.’ Among modern speculations may be instanced that of

Wesley, who thought that in the next life animals will be raised even

above their bodily and mental state at the creation, ‘the horridness of

their appearance will be exchanged for their primæval beauty,’ and it

even may be that they will be made what men are now, creatures capable

of religion. Adam Clarke’s argument for the future life of animals rests

on abstract justice: whereas they did not sin, but yet are involved in

the sufferings of sinful man, and cannot have in the present state the

happiness designed for them, it is reasonable that they must have it in

another.[766] Although, however, the primitive belief in the souls of

animals still survives to some extent in serious philosophy, it is

obvious that the tendency of educated opinion on the question whether

brutes have soul, as distinguished from life and mind, has for ages been

in a negative and sceptical direction. The doctrine has fallen from its

once high estate. It belonged originally to real, though rude science.

It has now sunk to become a favourite topic in that mild speculative

talk which still does duty so largely as intellectual conversation, and

even then its propounders defend it with a lurking consciousness of its

being after all a piece of sentimental nonsense.

Animals being thus considered in the primitive psychology to have souls

like human beings, it follows as the simplest matter of course that

tribes who kill wives and slaves, to dispatch their souls on errands of

duty with their departed lords, may also kill animals in order that

their spirits may do such service as is proper to them. The Pawnee

warrior’s horse is slain on his grave to be ready for him to mount

again, and the Comanche’s best horses are buried with his favourite

weapons and his pipe, all alike to be used in the distant happy

hunting-grounds.[767] In South America not only do such rites occur, but

they reach a practically disastrous extreme. Patagonian tribes, says

D’Orbigny, believe in another life, where they are to enjoy perfect

happiness, therefore they bury with the deceased his arms and ornaments,

and even kill on his tomb all the animals which belonged to him, that he

may find them in the abode of bliss; and this opposes an insurmountable

barrier to all civilization, by preventing them from accumulating

property and fixing their habitations.[768] Not only do Pope’s now

hackneyed lines express a real motive with which the Indian’s dog is

buried with him, but on the North American continent the spirit of the

dog has another remarkable office to perform. Certain Esquimaux, as

Cranz relates, would lay a dog’s head in a child’s grave, that the soul

of the dog, who is everywhere at home, might guide the helpless infant

to the land of souls. In accordance with this, Captain Scoresby in

Jameson’s Land found a dog’s skull in a small grave, probably a child’s.

Again, in the distant region of the Aztecs, one of the principal funeral

ceremonies was to slaughter a techichi, or native dog; it was burnt or

buried with the corpse, with a cotton thread fastened to its neck, and

its office was to convey the deceased across the deep waters of

Chiuhnahuapan, on the way to the Land of the Dead.[769] The dead

Buraet’s favourite horse, led saddled to the grave, killed, and flung

in, may serve for a Tatar example.[770] In Tonquin, even wild animals

have been customarily drowned at funeral ceremonies of princes, to be at

the service of the departed in the next world.[771] Among Semitic

tribes, an instance of the custom may be found in the Arab sacrifice of

a camel on the grave, for the dead man’s spirit to ride upon.[772] Among

the nations of the Aryan race in Europe, the prevalence of such rites is

deep, wide, and full of purpose. Thus, warriors were provided in death

with horses and housings, with hounds and falcons. Customs thus

described in chronicle and legend, are vouched for in our own time by

the opening of old barbaric burial-places. How clear a relic of savage

meaning lies here may be judged from a Livonian account as late as the

fourteenth century, which relates how men and women slaves, sheep and

oxen, with other things, were burnt with the dead, who, it was believed,

would reach some region of the living, and find there, with the

multitude of cattle and slaves, a country of life and happiness.[773] As

usual, these rites may be traced onward in survival. The Mongols, who

formerly slaughtered camels and horses at their owner’s burial, have

been induced to replace the actual sacrifice by a gift of the cattle to

the Lamas.[774] The Hindus offer a black cow to the Brahmans, in order

to secure their passage across the Vaitaranî, the river of death, and

will often die grasping the cow’s tail as if to swim across in

herdsman’s fashion, holding on to a cow.[775] It is mentioned as a

belief in Northern Europe that he who has given a cow to the poor will

find a cow to take him over the bridge of the dead, and a custom of

leading a cow in the funeral procession is said to have been kept up to

modern times.[776] All these rites probably belong together as connected

with ancient funeral sacrifice, and the survival of the custom of

sacrificing the warrior’s horse at his tomb is yet more striking.

Saint-Foix long ago put the French evidence very forcibly. Mentioning

the horse led at the funeral of Charles VI., with the four

valets-de-pied in black, and bareheaded, holding the corners of its

caparison, he recalls the horses and servants killed and buried with

præ-Christian kings. And that his readers may not think this an

extraordinary idea, he brings forward the records of property and horses

being presented at the offertory in Paris, in 1329, of Edward III.

presenting horses at King John’s funeral in London, and of the funeral

service for Bertrand Duguesclin, at St. Denis, in 1389, when horses were

offered, the Bishop of Auxerre laid his hand on their heads, and they

were afterwards compounded for.[777] Germany retained the actual

sacrifice within the memory of living men. A cavalry general, Count

Friedrich Kasimir Boos von Waldeck, was buried at Treves in 1781

according to the forms of the Teutonic Order; his horse was led in the

procession, and the coffin having been lowered into the grave the horse

was killed and thrown in upon it.[778] This was, perhaps, the last

occasion when such a sacrifice was consummated in solemn form in Europe.

But that pathetic incident of a soldier’s funeral, the leading of the

saddled and bridled charger in the mournful procession, keeps up to this

day a lingering reminiscence of the grim religious rite now passed away.

Plants, partaking with animals the phenomena of life and death, health

and sickness, not unnaturally have some kind of soul ascribed to them.

In fact, the notion of a vegetable soul, common to plants and to the

higher organisms possessing an animal soul in addition, was familiar to

mediæval philosophy, and is not yet forgotten by naturalists. But in the

lower ranges of culture, at least within one wide district of the world,

the souls of plants are much more fully identified with the souls of

animals. The Society Islanders seem to have attributed ‘varua,’ i.e.

surviving soul or spirit, not to men only but to animals and

plants.[779] The Dayaks of Borneo not only consider men and animals to

have a spirit or living principle, whose departure from the body causes

sickness and eventually death, but they also give to the rice its

‘samangat padi,’ or ‘spirit of the paddy,’ and they hold feasts to

retain this soul securely, lest the crop should decay.[780] The Karens

say that plants as well as men and animals have their ‘là’ (‘kelah’),

and the spirit of sickly rice is here also called back like a human

spirit considered to have left the body. Their formulas for the purpose

have even been written down, and this is part of one:—‘O come, rice

kelah, come. Come to the field. Come to the rice.... Come from the West.

Come from the East. From the throat of the bird, from the maw of the

ape, from the throat of the elephant.... From all granaries come. O rice

kelah, come to the rice.’[781] There is reason to think that the

doctrine of the spirits of plants lay deep in the intellectual history

of South-East Asia, but was in great measure superseded under Buddhist

influence. The Buddhist books show that in the early days of their

religion, it was matter of controversy whether trees had souls, and

therefore whether they might lawfully be injured. Orthodox Buddhism

decided against the tree-souls, and consequently against the scruple to

harm them, declaring trees to have no mind or sentient principle, though

admitting that certain dewas or spirits do reside in the body of trees,

and speak from within them. Buddhists also relate that a heterodox sect

kept up the early doctrine of the actual animate life of trees, in

connexion with which may be remembered Marco Polo’s somewhat doubtful

statement as to certain austere Indians objecting to green herbs for

such a reason, and some other passages from later writers. The subject

of the spirits of plants is an obscure one, whether from the lower races

not having definite opinions, or from our not finding it easy to trace

them.[782] The evidence from funeral sacrifices, so valuable as to most

departments of early psychology, fails us here, from plants not being

thought suitable to send for the service of the dead.[783] Yet, as we

shall see more fully elsewhere, there are two topics which bear closely

on the matter. On the one hand, the doctrine of transmigration widely

and clearly recognises the idea of trees or smaller plants being

animated by human souls; on the other, the belief in tree-spirits and

the practice of tree-worship involve notions more or less closely

coinciding with that of tree-souls, as when the classic hamadryad dies

with her tree, or when the Talein of South-East Asia, considering every

tree to have a demon or spirit, offers prayers before he cuts one down.

Thus far the details of the lower animistic philosophy are not very

unfamiliar to modern students. The primitive view of the souls of men

and beasts, as asserted or acted on in the lower and middle levels of

culture, so far belongs to current civilized thought, that those who

hold the doctrine to be false, and the practices based upon it futile,

can nevertheless understand and sympathise with the lower nations to

whom they are matters of the most sober and serious conviction. Nor is

even the notion of a separable spirit or soul as the cause of life in

plants too incongruous with ordinary ideas to be readily appreciable.

But the theory of souls in the lower culture stretches beyond this

limit, to take in a conception much stranger to modern thought. Certain

high savage races distinctly hold, and a large proportion of other

savage and barbarian races make a more or less close approach to, a

theory of separable and surviving souls or spirits belonging to stocks

and stones, weapons, boats, food, clothes, ornaments, and other objects

which to us are not merely soulless but lifeless.

Yet, strange as such a notion may seem to us at first sight, if we place

ourselves by an effort in the intellectual position of an uncultured

tribe, and examine the theory of object-souls from their point of view,

we shall hardly pronounce it irrational. In discussing the origin of

myth, some account has been already given of the primitive stage of

thought in which personality and life are ascribed not to men and beasts

only, but to things. It has been shown how what we call inanimate

objects—rivers, stones, trees, weapons, and so forth—are treated as

living intelligent beings, talked to, propitiated, punished for the harm

they do. Hume, whose ‘Natural History of Religion’ is perhaps more than

any other work the source of modern opinions as to the development of

religion, comments on the influence of this personifying stage of

thought. ‘There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all

beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities

with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are

intimately conscious.... The _unknown causes_, which continually employ

their thought, appearing always in the same aspect, are all apprehended

to be of the same kind or species. Nor is it long before we ascribe to

them thought and reason, and passion, and sometimes even the limbs and

figures of men, in order to bring them nearer to a resemblance with

ourselves.’ Auguste Comte has ventured to bring such a state of thought

under terms of strict definition in his conception of the primary mental

condition of mankind—a state of ‘pure fetishism, constantly

characterized by the free and direct exercise of our primitive tendency

to conceive all external bodies soever, natural or artificial, as

animated by a life essentially analogous to our own, with mere

differences of intensity.’[784] Our comprehension of the lower stages of

mental culture depends much on the thoroughness with which we can

appreciate this primitive, childlike conception, and in this our best

guide may be the memory of our own childish days. He who recollects when

there was still personality to him in posts and sticks, chairs, and

toys, may well understand how the infant philosophy of mankind could

extend the notion of vitality to what modern science only recognises as

lifeless things; thus one main part of the lower animistic doctrine as

to souls of objects is accounted for. The doctrine requires for its full

conception of a soul not only life, but also a phantom or apparitional

spirit; this development, however, follows without difficulty, for the

evidence of dreams and visions applies to the spirits of objects in much

the same manner as to human ghosts. Everyone who has seen visions while

lightheaded in fever, everyone who has ever dreamt a dream, has seen the

phantoms of objects as well as of persons. How then can we charge the

savage with far-fetched absurdity for taking into his philosophy and

religion an opinion which rests on the very evidence of his senses? The

notion is implicitly recognized in his accounts of ghosts, which do not

come naked, but clothed, and even armed; of course there must be spirits

of garments and weapons, seeing that the spirits of men come bearing

them. It will indeed place savage philosophy in no unfavourable light,

if we compare this extreme animistic development of it with the popular

opinion still surviving in civilized countries, as to ghosts and the

nature of the human soul as connected with them. When the ghost of

Hamlet’s father appeared armed cap-a-pe,

‘Such was the very armour he had on,

When he the ambitious Norway combated.’

And thus it is a habitual feature of the ghost-stories of the civilized,

as of the savage world, that the ghost comes dressed, and even dressed

in well-known clothing worn in life. Hearing as well as sight testifies

to the phantoms of objects: the clanking of ghostly chains and the

rustling of ghostly dresses are described in the literature of

apparitions. Now by the savage theory, according to which the ghost and

his clothes are alike real and objective, and by the modern scientific

theory, according to which both ghost and garment are alike imaginary

and subjective, the facts of apparitions are rationally met. But the

modern vulgar who ignore or repudiate the notion of ghosts of things,

while retaining the notion of ghosts of persons, have fallen into a

hybrid state of opinion which has neither the logic of the savage nor of

the civilized philosopher.

Among the lower races of mankind, three have been observed to hold most

explicitly and distinctly the doctrine of object-souls. These are the

Algonquin tribes, extending over a great district of North America, the

islanders of the Fijian group, and the Karens of Burma. Among the

Indians of North America, Father Charlevoix wrote, souls are, as it

were, the shadows and the animated images of the body, and it is by a

consequence of this principle that they believe everything to be animate

in the universe. This missionary was especially conversant with the

Algonquins, and it was among one of their tribes, the Ojibwas, that

Keating noticed the opinion that not only men and beasts have souls, but

inorganic things, such as kettles, &c., have in them a similar essence.

In the same district Father Le Jeune had described, in the seventeenth

century, the belief that the souls, not only of men and animals, but of

hatchets and kettles, had to cross the water to the Great Village, out

where the sun sets.[785] In interesting correspondence with this quaint

thought is Mariner’s description of the Fiji doctrine—‘If an animal or a

plant die, its soul immediately goes to Bolotoo; if a stone or any other

substance is broken, immortality is equally its reward; nay, artificial

bodies have equal good luck with men, and hogs, and yams. If an axe or a

chisel is worn out or broken up, away flies its soul for the service of

the gods. If a house is taken down or any way destroyed, its immortal

part will find a situation on the plains of Bolotoo; and, to confirm

this doctrine, the Fiji people can show you a sort of natural well, or

deep hole in the ground, at one of their islands, across the bottom of

which runs a stream of water, in which you may clearly perceive the

souls of men and women, beasts and plants, of stocks and stones, canoes

and houses, and of all the broken utensils of this frail world,

swimming, or rather tumbling along one over the other pell-mell into the

regions of immortality.’ A full generation later the Rev. Thomas

Williams, while remarking that the escape of brutes and lifeless

substances to the spirit-land of Mbulu does not receive universal credit

among the Fijians, nevertheless confirms the older account of it:—‘Those

who profess to have seen the souls of canoes, houses, plants, pots, or

any artificial bodies, swimming with other relics of this frail world on

the stream of the Kauvandra well, which bears them into the regions of

immortality, believe this doctrine as a matter of course; and so do

those who have seen the footmarks left about the same well by the ghosts

of dogs, pigs, &c.’[786] The theory among the Karens is stated by the

Rev. E. B. Cross, as follows:—‘Every object is supposed to have its

“kelah.” Axes and knives, as well as trees and plants, are supposed to

have their separate “kelahs.”’ ‘The Karen, with his axe and cleaver, may

build his house, cut his rice, and conduct his affairs, after death as

before.’[787]

As so many races perform funeral sacrifices of men and animals, in order

to dispatch their souls for the service of the soul of the deceased, so

tribes who hold this doctrine of object-souls very rationally sacrifice

objects, in order to transmit these souls. Among the Algonquin tribes,

the sacrifice of objects for the dead was a habitual rite, as when we

read of a warrior’s corpse being buried with musket and war-club,

calumet and war-paint, and a public address being made to the body at

burial concerning his future path; while in like manner a woman would be

buried with her paddle and kettle, and the carrying-strap for the

everlasting burden of her heavily-laden life. That the purpose of such

offerings is the transmission of the object’s spirit or phantom to the

possession of the man’s is explicitly stated as early as 1623 by Father

Lallemant; when the Indians buried kettles, furs, &c., with the dead,

they said that the bodies of the things remained, but their souls went

to the dead who used them. The whole idea is graphically illustrated in

the following Ojibwa tradition or myth. Gitchi Gauzini was a chief who

lived on the shores of Lake Superior, and once, after a few days’

illness, he seemed to die. He had been a skilful hunter, and had desired

that a fine gun which he possessed should be buried with him when he

died. But some of his friends not thinking him really dead, his body was

not buried; his widow watched him for four days, he came back to life,

and told his story. After death, he said, his ghost travelled on the

broad road of the dead toward the happy land, passing over great plains

of luxuriant herbage, seeing beautiful groves, and hearing the songs of

innumerable birds, till at last, from the summit of a hill, he caught

sight of the distant city of the dead, far across an intermediate space,

partly veiled in mist, and spangled with glittering lakes and streams.

He came in view of herds of stately deer and moose, and other game,

which with little fear walked near his path. But he had no gun, and

remembering how he had requested his friends to put his gun in his

grave, he turned back to go and fetch it. Then he met face to face the

train of men, women, and children who were travelling toward the city of

the dead. They were heavily laden with guns, pipes, kettles, meats, and

other articles; women were carrying basket-work and painted paddles, and

little boys had their ornamented clubs and their bows and arrows, the

presents of their friends. Refusing a gun which an overburdened

traveller offered him, the ghost of Gitchi Gauzini travelled back in

quest of his own, and at last reached the place where he had died. There

he could see only a great fire before and around him, and finding the

flames barring his passage on every side, he made a desperate leap

through, and awoke from his trance. Having concluded his story, he gave

his auditors this counsel, that they should no longer deposit so many

burdensome things with the dead, delaying them on their journey to the

place of repose, so that almost everyone he met complained bitterly. It

would be wiser, he said, only to put such things in the grave as the

deceased was particularly attached to, or made a formal request to have

deposited with him.[788]

With purpose no less distinct, when a dead Fijian chief is laid out

oiled and painted and dressed as in life, a heavy club is placed ready

near his right hand, which holds one or more of the much-prized carved

‘whale’s tooth’ ornaments. The club is to serve for defence against the

adversaries who await his soul on the road to Mbulu, seeking to slay and

eat him. We hear of a Fijian taking a club from a companion’s grave, and

remarking in explanation to a missionary who stood by, ‘The ghost of the

club has gone with him.’ The purpose of the whale’s tooth is this; on

the road to the land of the dead, near the solitary hill of

Takiveleyawa, there stands a ghostly pandanus-tree, and the spirit of

the dead man is to throw the spirit of the whale’s tooth at this tree,

having struck which he is to ascend the hill and await the coming of the

spirits of his strangled wives.[789] The funeral rites of the Karens

complete the present group. They kept up what seems a clear survival

from actual human and animal sacrifice, fastening up near an important

person’s grave a slave and a pony; these invariably released themselves,

and the slave became henceforth a free man. Moreover, the practice of

placing food, implements and utensils, and valuables of gold and silver,

near the remains of the deceased, was general among them.[790]

Now the sacrifice of property for the dead is one of the great religious

rites of the world; are we then justified in asserting that all men who

abandon or destroy property as a funeral ceremony believe the articles

to have spirits, which spirits are transmitted to the deceased? Not so;

it is notorious that there are people who recognize no such theory but

who nevertheless deposit offerings with the dead. Affectionate fancy or

symbolism, a horror of the association of death leading the survivors to

get rid of anything that even suggests the dreadful thought, a desire to

abandon the dead man’s property, an idea that the hovering ghost may

take pleasure in or make use of the gifts left for him, all these are or

may be efficient motives.[791] Yet, having made full allowance for all

this, we shall find good reason to judge that many other peoples, though

they may never have stated the theory of object-souls in the same

explicit way as the Algonquins, Fijians, and Karens, have recognized it

with more or less distinctness. It has given me the more confidence in

this opinion to find it held, under proper reservation, by Mr. W. R.

Alger, an American investigator, who in a treatise entitled ‘A Critical

History of the Doctrine of a Future Life’ has discussed the ethnography

of his subject with remarkable learning and sagacity. ‘The barbarian

brain,’ he writes, ‘seems to have been generally impregnated with the

feeling that everything else has a ghost as well as man.... The custom

of burning or burying things with the dead probably arose, in some cases

at least, from the supposition that every object, has its _manes_.’[792]

It will be desirable briefly to examine further the subject of funeral

offerings, as bearing on this interesting question of early psychology.

A wide survey of funeral sacrifices over the world will plainly show one

of their most usual motives to be a more or less defined notion of

benefiting the deceased, whether out of kindness to him or from fear of

his displeasure. How such an intention may have taken this practical

shape we can perhaps vaguely guess, familiar as we are with a state of

mind out of which funeral sacrifices could naturally have sprung. The

man is dead, but it is still possible to fancy him alive, to take his

cold hand, to speak to him, to place his chair at the table, to bury

suggestive mementoes in his coffin, to throw flowers into his grave, to

hang wreaths of everlastings on his tomb. The Cid may be set on Babieca

with his sword Tizona in his hand, and carried out to do battle as of

old against the unbeliever; the dead king’s meal may be carried in to

him in state, although the chamberlain must announce that the king does

not dine to-day. Such childlike ignoring of death, such childlike

make-believe that the dead can still do as heretofore, may well have led

the savage to bury with his kinsman the weapons, clothes, and ornaments

that he used in life, to try to feed the corpse, to put a cigar in the

mouth of the skull before its final burial, to lay playthings in the

infant’s grave. But one thought beyond would carry this dim blind fancy

into the range of logical reasoning. Granted that the man is dead and

his soul gone out of him, then the way to provide that departed soul

with food or clothes or weapons is to bury or burn them with the body,

for whatever happens to the man may be taken to happen to the objects

that lie beside him and share his fate, while the precise way in which

the transmission takes place may be left undecided. It is possible that

the funeral sacrifice customary among mankind may have rested at first,

and may to some extent still rest, on vague thoughts and imaginations

like these, as yet fitted into no more definite and elaborate

philosophic theory.

There are, however, two great groups of cases of funeral sacrifice,

which so logically lead up to or involve the notion of souls or spirits

of objects, that the sacrificer himself could hardly answer otherwise a

point-blank question as to their meaning. The first group is that in

which those who sacrifice men and beasts with the intention of conveying

their souls to the other world, also sacrifice lifeless things

indiscriminately with them. The second group is that in which the

phantoms of the objects sacrificed are traced distinctly into the

possession of the human phantom.

The Caribs, holding that after decease man’s soul found its way to the

land of the dead, sacrificed slaves on a chief’s grave to serve him in

the new life, and for the same purpose buried dogs with him, and also

weapons.[793] The Guinea negroes, at the funeral of a great man, killed

several wives and slaves to serve him in the other world, and put fine

clothes, gold fetishes, coral, beads, and other valuables, into the

coffin, to be used there too.[794] When the New Zealand chief had slaves

killed at his death for his service, and the mourning family gave his

chief widow a rope to hang herself with in the woods and so rejoin her

husband,[795] it is not easy to discern here a motive different from

that which induced them at the same time to provide the dead man also

with his weapons. Nor can an intellectual line well be drawn between the

intentions with which the Tunguz has buried with him his horse, his bow

and arrows, his smoking apparatus and kettle. In the typical description

which Herodotus gives of the funeral of the ancient Scythian chiefs, the

miscellaneous contents of the burial-mound, the strangled wife and

household servants, the horses, the choice articles of property, the

golden vessels, fairly represent the indiscriminate purpose which

actuated the barbaric sacrifice of creatures and things.[796] So in old

Europe, the warrior with his sword and spear, the horse with his saddle,

the hunter’s hound and hawk and his bow and arrow, the wife with her gay

clothes and jewels, lie together in the burial-mound. Their common

purpose has become one of the most undisputed inferences of Archæology.

As for what becomes of the objects sacrificed for the dead there are on

record the most distinct statements taken from the sacrificers

themselves. Although the objects rot in the grave or are consumed on the

pile, they nevertheless come in some way into the possession of the

disembodied souls they are intended for. Not the material things

themselves, but phantasmal shapes corresponding to them, are carried by

the souls of the dead on their far journey beyond the grave, or are used

in the world of spirits; while sometimes the phantoms of the dead appear

to the living, bearing property which they have received by sacrifice,

or demanding something that has been withheld. The Australian will take

his weapons with him to his paradise.[797] A Tasmanian, asked the reason

of a spear being deposited in a native’s grave, replied ‘To fight with

when he is asleep.’[798] Many Greenlanders thought that the kayak and

arrows and tools laid by a man’s grave, the knife and sewing implements

laid by a woman’s, would be used in the next world.[799] The instruments

buried with the Sioux are for him to make a living with hereafter; the

paints provided for the dead Iroquois were to enable him to appear

decently in the other world.[800] The Aztec’s water-bottle was to serve

him on the journey to Mictlan, the land of the dead; the bonfire of

garments and baskets and spoils of war was intended to send them with

him, and somehow to protect him against the bitter wind; the offerings

to the warrior’s manes on earth would reach him on the heavenly

plains.[801] Among the old Peruvians, a dead prince’s wives would hang

themselves in order to continue in his service, and many of his

attendants would be buried in his fields or places of favourite resort,

in order that his soul, passing through those places, might take their

souls along with him for future service. In perfect consistency with

these strong animistic notions, the Peruvians declared that their reason

for sacrifice of property to the dead was that they ‘have seen, or

thought they saw, those who have long been dead walking, adorned with

the things that were buried with them, and accompanied by their wives

who had been buried alive.’[802]

As definite an implication of the spirit or phantom of an object appears

in a recent account from Madagascar, where things are buried to become

in some way useful to the dead. When King Radama died, it was reported

and firmly believed that his ghost was seen one night in the garden of

his country seat, dressed in one of the uniforms which had been buried

with him, and riding one of the best horses killed opposite his

tomb.[803] Turanian tribes of North Asia avow that the motive of their

funeral offerings of horses and sledges, clothes and axes and kettles,

flint and steel and tinder, meat and butter, is to provide the dead for

his journey to the land of souls, and for his life there.[804] Among the

Esths of Northern Europe, the dead starts properly equipped on his

ghostly journey with needle and thread, hairbrush and soap, bread and

brandy and coin; a toy, if it is a child. And so full a consciousness of

practical meaning survived till lately, that now and then a soul would

come back at night to reproach its relations with not having provided

properly for it, but left it in distress.[805] To turn from these now

Europeanized Tatars to a rude race of the Eastern Archipelago, among the

Orang Binua of Sambawa there prevails this curious law of inheritance;

not only does each surviving relative, father, mother, son, brother, and

so forth, take his or her proper share, but the deceased inherits one

share from himself, which is devoted to his use by eating the animals at

the funeral feast, burning everything else that will burn, and burying

the remainder.[806] In Cochin China, the common people object to

celebrating their feast of the dead on the same day with the upper

classes, for this excellent reason, that the aristocratic souls might

make the servant souls carry home their presents for them. These people

employ all the resources of their civilization to perform with the more

lavish extravagance the savage funeral sacrifices. Here are details from

an account published in 1849 of the funeral of a late king of Cochin

China. ‘When the corpse of Thien Tri was deposited in the coffin, there

were also deposited in it many things for the use of the deceased in the

other world, such as his crown, turbans, clothes of all descriptions,

gold, silver, and other precious articles, rice and other provisions.’

Meals were set out near the coffin, and there was a framed piece of

damask with woollen characters, the abode of one of the souls of the

defunct. In the tomb, an enclosed edifice of stone, the childless wives

of the deceased were to be perpetually shut up to guard the sepulchre,

‘and prepare daily the food and other things of which they think the

deceased has need in the other life.’ At the time of the deposit of the

coffin in a cavern behind the tomb building, there were burnt there

great piles of boats, stages, and everything used in the funeral, ‘and

moreover of all the objects which had been in use by the king during his

lifetime, of chessmen, musical instruments, fans, boxes, parasols, mats,

fillets, carriages, &c., &c., and likewise a horse and an elephant of

wood and pasteboard.’ ‘Some months after the funeral, at two different

times, there were constructed in a forest near a pagoda two magnificent

palaces of wood with rich furnishings, in all things similar to the

palace which the defunct monarch had inhabited. Each palace was composed

of twenty rooms, and the most scrupulous attention was given in order

that nothing might be awanting necessary for a palace, and these palaces

were burned with great pomp, and it is thus that immense riches have

been given to the flames from the foolish belief that it would serve the

dead in the other world.’[807]

Though the custom is found among the Beduins of arraying the dead with

turban, girdle, and sword, yet funeral offerings for the service of

the dead are by no means conspicuous among Semitic nations. The

mention of the rite by Ezekiel, while showing a full sense of its

meaning, characterizes it as not Israelite, but Gentile: ‘The mighty

fallen of the uncircumcised, which are gone down to Hades with weapons

of war, and they have laid their swords under their heads.’[808] Among

the Aryan nations, on the contrary, such funeral offerings are known

to have prevailed widely and of old, while for picturesqueness of rite

and definiteness of purpose they can scarcely be surpassed even among

savages. Why the Brahman’s sacrificial instruments are to be burnt

with him on the funeral pile, appears from this line of the Veda

recited at the ceremony: ‘Yadâ gachâhatyasunîtimetâmathâ devânâm

vasanîrbhavâti,’—‘When he cometh unto that life, faithfully will he do

the service of the gods.’[809] Lucian is sarcastic, but scarcely

unfair, in his comments on the Greek funeral rites, speaking of those

who slew horses and slave-girls and cupbearers, and burned or buried

clothes and ornaments, as for use and service in the world below; of

the meat and drink offerings on the tombs which serve to feed the

bodiless shades in Hades; of the splendid garments and the garlands of

the dead, that they might not suffer cold upon the road, nor be seen

naked by Kerberos. For Kerberos was intended the honey-cake deposited

with the dead; and the obolus placed in the mouth was the toll for

Charon, save at Hermione in Argolis, where men thought there was a

short descent to Hades, and therefore provided the dead with no coin

for the grim ferryman. How such ideas could be realized, may be seen

in the story of Eukrates, whose dead wife appeared to him to demand

one of her golden sandals, which had been dropped underneath the

chest, and so not burnt for her with the rest of her wardrobe; or in

the story of Periander, whose dead wife Melissa refused to give him an

oracular response, for she was shivering and naked, because the

garments buried with her had not been burnt, and so were of no use,

wherefore Periander plundered the Corinthian women of their best

clothes, which he burned in a great trench with prayer, and now

obtained his answer.[810] The ancient Gauls were led, by their belief

in another life, to burn and bury with the dead things suited to the

living; nor is the record improbable that they transferred to the

world below the repayment of loans, for even in modern centuries the

Japanese would borrow money in this life, to be repaid with heavy

interest in the next.[811] The souls of the Norse dead took with them

from their earthly home servants and horses, boats and ferry-money,

clothes and weapons. Thus, in death as in life, they journeyed,

following the long dark ‘hell-way’ (helvegr). The ‘hell-shoon’

(helskó) were bound upon the dead man’s feet for the toilsome journey;

and when King Harald was slain in the battle of Bravalla, they drove

his war-chariot, with the corpse upon it into the great burial-mound,

and there they killed the horse, and King Hring gave his own saddle

beside, that the fallen chief might ride or drive to Walhalla, as it

pleased him.[812] Lastly, in the Lithuanian and old Prussian district,

where Aryan heathendom held its place in Europe so firmly and so late,

accounts of funeral sacrifice of men, and beasts, and things, date on

even beyond the middle ages. Even as they thought that men would live

again in the resurrection rich or poor, noble or peasant, as on earth,

so ‘they believed that the things burned would rise again with them,

and serve them as before.’ Among these people lived the Kriwe

Kriweito, the great priest, whose house was on the high steep mountain

Anafielas. All the Souls of their dead must clamber up this mountain,

wherefore they burned with them claws of bears and lynxes for their

help. All the souls must pass through the Kriwe’s house, and he could

describe to the surviving relatives of each the clothes, and horse,

and weapons he had seen him come with, and even show, for greater

certainty, some mark made with lance or other instrument by the

passing soul.[813] Such examples of funeral rites show a common

ceremony, and to a great degree a common purpose, obtaining from

savagery through barbarism, and even into the higher civilization. Now

could we have required from all these races a distinct answer to the

question, whether they believed in spirits of all things, from men and

beasts down to spears and cloaks, sticks and stones, it is likely that

we might have often received the same acknowledgment of fully

developed animism which stands on record in North America, Polynesia,

and Burma. Failing such direct testimony, it is at least justifiable

to say that the lower culture, by practically dealing with

object-souls, goes far towards acknowledging their existence.

Before quitting the discussion of funeral offerings for transmission to

the dead, the custom must be traced to its final decay. It is apt not to

die out suddenly, but to leave surviving remnants, more or less dwindled

in form and changed in meaning. The Kanowits of Borneo talk of setting a

man’s property adrift for use in the next world, and even go so far as

to lay out his valuables by the bier, but in fact they only commit to

the frail canoe a few old things not worth plundering.[814] So in North

America, the funeral sacrifice of the Winnebagos has come down to

burying a pipe and tobacco with the dead, and sometimes a club in a

warrior’s grave, while the goods brought and hung up at the burial-place

are no longer left there, but the survivors gamble for them.[815] The

Santals of Bengal put two vessels, one for rice and the other for water,

on the dead man’s couch, with a few rupees, to enable him to appease the

demons on the threshold of the shadowy world, but when the funeral pile

is ready these things are removed.[816] The fanciful art of replacing

costly offerings by worthless imitations is at this day worked out into

the quaintest devices in China. As the men and horses dispatched by fire

for the service of the dead are but paper figures, so offerings of

clothes and money may be represented likewise. The imitations of Spanish

pillar-dollars in pasteboard covered with tinfoil, the sheets of

tinfoil-paper which stand for silver money, and if coloured yellow for

gold, are consumed in such quantities that the sham becomes a serious

reality, for the manufacture of mock-money is the trade of thousands of

women and children in a Chinese city. In a similar way trunks full of

property are forwarded in the care of the newly deceased, to friends who

are gone before. Pretty paper houses, ‘replete with every luxury,’ as

our auctioneers say, are burnt for the dead Chinaman to live in

hereafter, and the paper keys are burnt also, that he may unfasten the

paper locks of the paper chests that hold the ingots of gold-paper and

silver-paper, which are to be realized as current gold and silver in the

other world, an idea which, however, does not prevent the careful

survivors from collecting the ashes to re-extract the tin from them in

this.[817] Again, when the modern Hindu offers to his dead parent

funeral cakes with flowers and betel, he presents a woollen yam which he

lays across the cake, and naming the deceased says, ‘May this apparel,

made of woollen yam, be acceptable to thee.’[818] Such facts as these

suggest a symbolic meaning in the practically useless offerings which

Sir John Lubbock groups together—the little models of kayaks and spears

in Esquimaux graves, the models of objects in Egyptian tombs, and the

flimsy unserviceable jewelry buried with the Etruscan dead.[819]

Just as people in Borneo, after they had become Mohammedans, still kept

up the rite of burying provisions for the dead man’s journey, as a mark

of respect,[820] so the rite of interring funeral offerings survived in

Christian Europe. The ancient Greek burial of the dead with the obolus

in his mouth for Charon’s toll is represented in the modern Greek world,

where Charon and the funeral coin are both familiar. As the old

Prussians furnished the dead with spending-money to buy refreshment on

his weary journey, so to this day German peasants bury a corpse with

money in his mouth or hand, a fourpenny-piece or so. Similar little

funeral offerings of coin are recorded in the folklore books elsewhere

in Europe.[821] Christian funeral offerings of this kind are mostly

trifling in value, and doubtful as to the meaning with which they were

kept up. The early Christians retained the heathen custom of placing in

the tomb such things as articles of the toilette and children’s

playthings; modern Greeks would place oars on a shipman’s grave, and

other such tokens for other crafts; the beautiful classic rite of

scattering flowers over the dead still holds its place in Europe.[822]

Whatever may have been the thoughts which first prompted these kindly

ceremonies, they were thoughts belonging to far præ-Christian ages. The

change of sacrifice from its early significance is shown among the

Hindus, who have turned it to account for purposes of priestcraft: he

who gives water or shoes to a Brahman will find water to refresh him,

and shoes to wear, on the journey to the next world, while the gift of a

present house will secure him a future palace.[823] In interesting

correspondence with this, is a transition from pagan to Christian

folklore in our own land. The Lyke-Wake Dirge, the not yet forgotten

funeral chant of the North Country, tells, like some savage or barbaric

legend, of the passage over the Bridge of Death and the dreadful journey

to the other world. But though the ghostly traveller’s feet are still

shod with the old Norseman’s hell-shoon, he gains them no longer by

funeral offering, but by his own charity in life:—

‘This a nighte, this a nighte

Every night and alle;

Fire and fleet and candle-light,