CHAPTER XII.

PRIMITIVE CULTURE

PRIMITIVE CULTURE

RESEARCHES INTO THE DEVELOPMENT

OF MYTHOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION,

LANGUAGE, ART, AND CUSTOM

BY EDWARD B. TYLOR, D.C.L., LL.D., F.R.S.

PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

AUTHOR OF “RESEARCHES INTO THE EARLY HISTORY OF MANKIND,” ETC.

“Ce n’est pas dans les possibilités, c’est dans l’homme même qu’il

faut étudier l’homme: il ne s’agit pas d’imaginer ce qu’il auroit pû

ou dû faire, mais de regarder ce qu’il fait.”—DE BROSSES.

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. II

LONDON

JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.

1920

PRINTED IN U.S.A.

[_Rights of Translation and Reproduction reserved_]

CONTENTS OF THE SECOND VOLUME.

CHAPTER XII.

ANIMISM (_continued_).

Doctrine of Soul’s Existence after Death; its main divisions,

Transmigration and Future Life—Transmigration of Souls: re-birth in

Human and Animal Bodies, transference to Plants and Objects—Resurrection

of Body: scarcely held in savage religion—Future Life: a general if not

universal doctrine of low races—Continued existence, rather than

Immortality; second death of Soul—Ghost of Dead remains on earth,

especially if corpse unburied; its attachment to bodily remains—Feasts

of the Dead 1

CHAPTER XIII.

ANIMISM (_continued_).

Journey of the Soul to the Land of the Dead—Visits by the Living to the

Regions of Departed Souls—Connexion of such legends with myths of

Sunset: the Land of the Dead thus imagined as in the West—Realization of

current religious ideas, whether of savage or civilized theology, in

narratives of visits to the Regions of Souls—Localization of the Future

Life—Distant earthly region: Earthly Paradise, Isles of the

Blest—Subterranean Hades or Sheol—Sun, Moon, Stars—Heaven—Historical

course of belief as to such localization—Nature of Future

Life—Continuance-theory, apparently original, belongs especially to the

lower races—Transitional theories—Retribution-theory, apparently

derived, belongs especially to the higher races—Doctrine of Moral

Retribution as developed in the higher culture—Survey of Doctrine of

Future State, from savage to civilized stages—Its practical effect on

the sentiment and conduct of Mankind 44

CHAPTER XIV.

ANIMISM (_continued_).

Animism, expanding from the Doctrine of Souls to the wider

Doctrine of Spirits, becomes a complete Philosophy of Natural

Religion—Definition of Spirits similar to and apparently

modelled on that of Souls—Transition-stage: classes of Souls

passing into good and evil Demons—Manes-Worship—Doctrine of

Embodiment of Spirits in human, animal, vegetable, and inert

bodies—Demoniacal Possession and Obsession as causes of Disease and

Oracle-inspiration—Fetishism—Disease-spirits embodied—Ghost attached to

remains of Corpse—Fetish produced by a Spirit embodied in, attached to,

or operating through, an Object—Analogues of Fetish-doctrine in Modern

Science—Stock-and-Stone-Worship—Idolatry—Survival of Animistic

Phraseology in modern Language—Decline of Animistic theory of Nature 108

CHAPTER XV.

ANIMISM (_continued_).

Spirits regarded as personal causes of Phenomena of the World—Pervading

Spirits as good and evil Demons affecting man—Spirits manifest in Dreams

and Visions: Nightmares; Incubi and Succubi; Vampires; Visionary

Demons—Demons of darkness repelled by fire—Demons otherwise manifest:

seen by animals; detected by footprints—Spirits conceived and treated as

material—Guardian and Familiar Spirits—Nature-Spirits; historical course

of the doctrine—Spirits of Volcanos, Whirlpools, Rocks—Water-Worship:

Spirits of Wells, Streams, Lakes, &c.—Tree-Worship: Spirits embodied in

or inhabiting Trees; Spirits of Groves and Forests—Animal-worship:

Animals Worshipped, directly, or as incarnations or representatives of

Deities; Totemism; Serpent-Worship—Species-Deities; their relation to

Archetypal Ideas 184

CHAPTER XVI.

ANIMISM (_continued_).

Higher Deities of Polytheism—Human characteristics applied to

Deity—Lords of Spiritual Hierarchy—Polytheism: its course of development

in lower and higher Culture—Principles of its investigation;

classification of Deities according to central conceptions of their

significance and function—Heaven-god—Rain

god—Thunder-god—Wind-gods—Earth-god—Water

god—Sea-god—Fire-god—Sun-god—Moon-god 247

CHAPTER XVII.

ANIMISM (_continued_).

Polytheism comprises a class of great Deities, ruling the course of

Nature and the life of Man—Childbirth-god—Agriculture-god—War-god—God of

the Dead—First Man as Divine Ancestor—Dualism; its rudimentary and

unethical nature among low races; its development through the course of

culture—Good and Evil Deity—Doctrine of Divine Supremacy, distinct from,

while tending towards, the doctrine of Monotheism—Idea of a Highest or

Supreme Deity evolved in various forms; its place as completion of the

Polytheistic system and outcome of the Animistic philosophy; its

continuance and development among higher nations—General survey of

Animism as a Philosophy of Religion—Recapitulation of the theory

advanced as to its development through successive stages of culture; its

primary phases best represented among the lower races, while survivals

of these among the higher races mark the transition from savage through

barbaric to civilized faiths—Transition of Animism in the History of

Religion; its earlier and later stages as a Philosophy of the Universe;

its later stages as the principle of a Moral Institution 304

CHAPTER XVIII.

RITES AND CEREMONIES.

Religious Rites: their purpose practical or symbolic—Prayer: its

continuity from low to high levels of Culture; its lower phases

Unethical; its higher phases Ethical—Sacrifice: its original Gift-theory

passes into the Homage-theory and the Abnegation-theory—Manner of

reception of Sacrifice by Deity—Material Transfer to elements,

fetish-animals, priests; consumption of substance by deity or idol;

offering of blood; transmission by fire; incense—Essential transfer:

consumption of essence, savour, &c.—Spiritual Transfer: consumption or

transmission of soul of offering—Motive of Sacrificer—Transition from

Gift-theory to Homage-theory: insignificant and formal offerings;

sacrificial banquets—Abnegation-theory; sacrifice of children,

&c.—Sacrifice of Substitutes: part given for whole; inferior life for

superior; effigies—Modern survival of Sacrifice in folklore and

religion—Fasting, as a means of producing ecstatic vision; its course

from lower to higher Culture—Drugs use to produce ecstasy—Swoons and

fits induced for religious purposes—Orientation: its relation to

Sun-myth and Sun-worship; rules of East and West as to burial of dead,

position of worship, and structure of temple—Lustration by Water and

Fire: its transition from material to symbolic purification; its

connexion with special events of life; its appearance among the lower

races—Lustration of new-born children; of women; of those polluted by

bloodshed or the dead—Lustration continued at higher levels of

Culture—Conclusion 362

CHAPTER XIX.

CONCLUSION.

Practical results of the study of Primitive Culture—Its bearing least

upon Positive Science, greatest upon Intellectual, Moral, Social, and

Political Philosophy—Language—Mythology—Ethics and Law—Religion—Action

of the Science of Culture, as a means of furthering progress and

removing hindrance, effective in the course of Civilization 443

CHAPTER XII.

ANIMISM (_continued_).

Doctrine of Soul’s Existence after Death; its main divisions,

Transmigration and Future Life—Transmigration of Souls: re-birth in

Human and Animal Bodies, transference to Plants and

Objects—Resurrection of Body: scarcely held in savage

religion—Future Life: a general if not universal doctrine of low

races—Continued existence, rather than Immortality; second death of

Soul—Ghost of Dead remains on earth, especially if corpse unburied;

its attachment to bodily remains—Feasts of the Dead.

Having thus traced upward from the lower levels of culture the opinions

of mankind as to the souls, spirits, ghosts, or phantoms, considered to

belong to men, to the lower animals, to plants, and to things, we are

now prepared to investigate one of the great religious doctrines of the

world, the belief in the soul’s continued existence in a Life after

Death. Here let us once more call to mind the consideration which cannot

be too strongly put forward, that the doctrine of a Future Life as held

by the lower races is the all but necessary outcome of savage Animism.

The evidence that the lower races believe the figures of the dead seen

in dreams and visions to be their surviving souls, not only goes far to

account for the comparative universality of their belief in the

continued existence of the soul after the death of the body, but it

gives the key to many of their speculations on the nature of this

existence, speculations rational enough from the savage point of view,

though apt to seem far-fetched absurdities to moderns in their much

changed intellectual condition. The belief in a Future Life falls into

two main divisions. Closely connected and even largely overlapping one

another, both world-wide in their distribution, both ranging back in

time to periods of unknown antiquity, both deeply rooted in the lowest

strata of human life which lie open to our observation, these two

doctrines have in the modern world passed into wonderfully different

conditions. The one is the theory of the Transmigration of Souls, which

has indeed risen from its lower stages to establish itself among the

huge religious communities of Asia, great in history, enormous even in

present mass, yet arrested and as it seems henceforth unprogressive in

development; but the more highly educated world has rejected the ancient

belief, and it now only survives in Europe in dwindling remnants. Far

different has been the history of the other doctrine, that of the

independent existence of the personal soul after the death of the body,

in a Future Life. Passing onward through change after change in the

condition of the human race, modified and renewed in its long ethnic

course, this great belief may be traced from its crude and primitive

manifestations among savage races to its establishment in the heart of

modern religion, where the faith in a future existence forms at once an

inducement to goodness, a sustaining hope through suffering and across

the fear of death, and an answer to the perplexed problem of the

allotment of happiness and misery in this present world, by the

expectation of another world to set this right.

In investigating the doctrine of Transmigration, it will be well first

to trace its position among the lower races, and afterwards to follow

its developments, so far as they extend in the higher civilization. The

temporary migration of souls into material substances, from human bodies

down to morsels of wood and stone, is a most important part of the lower

psychology. But it does not relate to the continued existence of the

soul after death, and may be more conveniently treated of elsewhere, in

connexion with such subjects as dæmoniacal possession and

fetish-worship. We are here concerned with the more permanent tenancy of

souls for successive lives in successive bodies.

Permanent transition, new birth, or re-incarnation of human souls in

other human bodies, is especially considered to take place by the soul

of a deceased person animating the body of an infant. It is recorded by

Brebeuf that the Hurons, when little children died, would bury them by

the wayside, that their souls might enter into mothers passing by, and

so be born again.[1] In North-West America, among the Tacullis, we hear

of direct transfusion of soul by the medicine-man, who, putting his

hands on the breast of the dying or dead, then holds them over the head

of a relative and blows through them; the next child born to this

recipient of the departed soul is animated by it, and takes the rank and

name of the deceased.[2] The Nutka Indians not without ingenuity

accounted for the existence of a distant tribe speaking the same

language as themselves, by declaring them to be the spirits of their

dead.[3] In Greenland, where the wretched custom of abandoning and even

plundering widows and orphans was tending to bring the whole race to

extinction, a helpless widow would seek to persuade some father that the

soul of a dead child of his had passed into a living child of hers, or

_vice versâ_, thus gaining for herself a new relative and protector.[4]

It is mostly ancestral or kindred souls that are thought to enter into

children, and this kind of transmigration is therefore from the savage

point of view a highly philosophical theory, accounting as it does so

well for the general resemblance between parents and children, and even

for the more special phenomena of atavism. In North-West America, among

the Koloshes, the mother sees in a dream the deceased relative whose

transmitted soul will give his likeness to the child;[5] and in

Vancouver’s Island in 1860 a lad was much regarded by the Indians

because he had a mark like the scar of a gun-shot wound on his hip, it

being believed that a chief dead some four generations before, who had

such a mark, had returned.[6] In Old Calabar, if a mother loses a child,

and another is born soon after, she thinks the departed one to have come

back.[7] The Wanika consider that the soul of a dead ancestor animates a

child, and this is why it resembles its father or mother;[8] in Guinea a

child bearing a strong resemblance, physical or mental, to a dead

relative, is supposed to have inherited his soul;[9] and the Yorubas,

greeting a new-born infant with the salutation, ‘Thou art come!’ look

for signs to show what ancestral soul has returned among them.[10] Among

the Khonds of Orissa, births are celebrated by a feast on the seventh

day, and the priest, divining by dropping rice-grains in a cup of water,

and judging from observations made on the person of the infant,

determines which of his progenitors has reappeared, and the child

generally at least among the northern tribes receives the name of that

ancestor.[11] In Europe the Lapps repeat an instructive animistic idea

just noticed in America; the future mother was told in a dream what name

to give her child, this message being usually given by the very spirit

of the deceased ancestor, who was about to be incarnate in her.[12]

Among the lower races generally the renewal of old family names by

giving them to new-born children may always be suspected of involving

some such thought. The following is a curious pair of instances from the

two halves of the globe. The New Zealand priest would repeat to the

infant a long list of names of its ancestors, fixing upon that name

which the child by sneezing or crying when it was uttered, was

considered to select for itself; while the Cheremiss in Russia would

shake the baby till it cried, and then repeat names to it, till it chose

itself one by leaving off crying.[13]

The belief in the new human birth of the departed soul, which has even

led West African negroes to commit suicide when in distant slavery, that

they may revive in their own land, in fact amounts among several of the

lower races to a distinct doctrine of an earthly resurrection. One of

the most remarkable forms which this belief assumes is when dark-skinned

races, wanting some reasonable theory to account for the appearance

among them of human creatures of a new strange sort, the white men, and

struck with their pallid deathly hue combined with powers that seem

those of superhuman spiritual beings, have determined that the manes of

their dead must have come back in this wondrous shape. The aborigines of

Australia have expressed this theory in the simple formula, ‘Blackfellow

tumble down, jump up Whitefellow.’ Thus a native who was hanged years

ago at Melbourne expressed in his last moments the hopeful belief that

he would jump up Whitefellow, and have lots of sixpences. The doctrine

has been current among them since early days of European intercourse,

and in accordance with it they habitually regarded the Englishmen as

their own deceased kindred, come back to their country from an

attachment to it in a former life. Real or imagined likeness completed

the delusion, as when Sir George Grey was hugged and wept over by an old

woman who found in him a son she had lost, or when a convict, recognized

as a deceased relative, was endowed anew with the land he had possessed

during his former life. A similar theory may be traced northward by the

Torres Islands to New Caledonia, where the natives thought the white men

to be the spirits of the dead who bring sickness, and assigned this as

their reason for wishing to kill white men.[14] In Africa, again, the

belief is found among the Western negroes that they will rise again

white, and the Bari of the White Nile, believing in the resurrection of

the dead on earth, considered the first white people they saw as

departed spirits thus come back.[15]

Next, the lower psychology, drawing no definite line of demarcation

between souls of men and of beasts, can at least admit without

difficulty the transmission of human souls into the bodies of the lower

animals. A series of examples from among the native tribes of America

will serve well to show the various ways in which such ideas are worked

out. The Ahts of Vancouver’s Island consider the living man’s soul able

to enter into other bodies of men and animals, going in and out like the

inhabitant of a house. In old times, they say, men existed in the forms

of birds, beasts, and fishes, or these had the spirits of the Indians in

their bodies; some think that after death they will pass again into the

bodies of the animals they occupied in this former state.[16] In an

Indian district of North-West California, we find natives believing the

spirits of their dead to enter into bears, and travellers have heard of

a tribe begging the life of a wrinkle-faced old she grizzly bear as the

recipient of the soul of some particular grandam, whom they fancied the

creature to resemble.[17] So, among the Esquimaux, a traveller noticed a

widow who was living for conscience’ sake upon birds, and would not

touch walrus-meat, which the angekok had forbidden her for a time,

because her late husband had entered into a walrus.[18] Among other

North American tribes, we hear of the Powhatans refraining from doing

harm to certain small wood-birds which received the souls of their

chiefs;[19] of Huron souls turning into turtle-doves after the burial of

their bones at the Feast of the Dead;[20] of that pathetic funeral rite

of the Iroquois, the setting free a bird on the evening of burial, to

carry away the soul.[21] In Mexico, the Tlascalans thought that after

death the souls of nobles would animate beautiful singing birds, while

plebeians passed into weasels and beetles and such like vile

creatures.[22] So, in Brazil, the Içannas say that the souls of the

brave will become beautiful birds, feeding on pleasant fruits, but

cowards will be turned into reptiles.[23] Among the Abipones we hear of

certain little ducks which fly in flocks at night, uttering a mournful

hiss, and which fancy associates with the souls of the dead;[24] while

in Popayan it is said that doves were not killed, as inspired by

departed souls.[25] Lastly, transmigration into brutes is also a

received doctrine in South America as when a missionary heard a

Chiriquane woman of western Brazil say of a fox, ‘May not that be the

spirit of my dead daughter?’[26]

In Africa, again, mention is made of the Maravi thinking that the souls

of bad men became jackals, and of good men snakes.[27] The Zulus, while

admitting that a man may turn into a wasp or lizard, work out in the

fullest way the idea of the dead becoming snakes, a creature whose

change of skin has so often been associated with the thought of

resurrection and immortality. It is especially certain green or brown

harmless snakes, which come gently and fearlessly into houses, which are

considered to be ‘amatongo’ or ancestors, and therefore are treated

respectfully, and have offerings of food given them. In two ways, the

dead man who has become a snake can still be recognized; if the creature

is one-eyed, or has a scar or some other mark, it is recognized as the

‘itongo’ of a man who was thus marked in life; but if he had no mark the

‘itongo’ appears in human shape in dreams, thus revealing the

personality of the snake.[28] In Guinea, monkeys found near a graveyard

are supposed to be animated by the spirits of the dead, and in certain

localities monkeys, crocodiles, and snakes, being thought men in

metempsychosis, are held sacred.[29] It is to be borne in mind that

notions of this kind may form in barbaric psychology but a portion of

the wide doctrine of the soul’s future existence. For a conspicuous

instance of this, let us take the system of the Gold-Coast negroes. They

believe that the ‘kla’ or ‘kra,’ the vital soul, becomes at death a

‘sisa’ or ghost, which can remain in the house with the body, plague the

living, and cause sickness, till it departs or is driven by the sorcerer

to the bank of the River Volta, where the ghosts build themselves houses

and dwell. But they can and do come back from this Land of Souls. They

can be born again as souls in new human bodies, and a soul who was poor

before will now be rich. Many will not come back as men, but will become

animals. To an African mother who has lost her child, it is a

consolation to say, ‘He will come again.’[30]

In higher levels of culture, the theory of re-embodiment of the soul

appears in strong and varied development. Though seemingly not received

by the early Aryans, the doctrine of migration was adopted and adapted

by Hindu philosophy, and forms an integral part of that great system

common to Brahmanism and Buddhism, wherein successive births or

existences are believed to carry on the consequences of past and prepare

the antecedents of future life. To the Hindu the body is but the

temporary receptacle of the soul, which, ‘bound in the chains of deeds’

and ‘eating the fruits of past actions,’ promotes or degrades itself

along a series of embodiments in plant, beast, man, deity. Thus all

creatures differ rather in degree than kind, all are akin to man, an

elephant or ape or worm may once have been human, and may become human

again, a pariah or barbarian is at once low-caste among men and

high-caste among brutes. Through such bodies migrate the sinful souls

which desire has drawn down from primal purity into gross material

being; the world where they do penance for the guilt incurred in past

existences is a huge reformatory, and life is the long grievous process

of developing evil into good. The rules are set forth in the book of

Manu how souls endowed with the quality of goodness acquire divine

nature, while souls governed by passion take up the human state, and

souls sunk in darkness are degraded to brutes. Thus the range of

migration stretches downward from gods and saints, through holy

ascetics, Brahmans, nymphs, kings, counsellors, to actors, drunkards,

birds, dancers, cheats, elephants, horses, Sudras, barbarians, wild

beasts, snakes, worms, insects, and inert things. Obscure as the

relation mostly is between the crime and its punishment in a new life,

there may be discerned through the code of penal transmigration an

attempt at appropriateness of penalty, and an intention to punish the

sinner wherein he sinned. For faults committed in a previous existence

men are afflicted with deformities, the stealer of food shall be

dyspeptic, the scandal-monger shall have foul breath, the horse-stealer

shall go lame, and in consequence of their deeds men shall be born

idiots, blind, deaf and dumb, mis-shaped, and thus despised of good men.

After expiation of their wickedness in the hells of torment, the

murderer of a Brahman may pass into a wild beast or pariah; he who

adulterously dishonours his guru or spiritual father shall be a hundred

times re-born as grass, a bush, a creeper, a carrion bird, a beast of

prey; the cruel shall become blood-thirsty beasts; stealers of grain and

meat shall turn into rats and vultures; the thief who took dyed

garments, kitchen-herbs, or perfumes, shall become accordingly a red

partridge, a peacock, or a musk-rat. In short, ‘in whatever disposition

of mind a man accomplishes such and such an act, he shall reap the fruit

in a body endowed with such and such a quality.’[31] The recognition of

plants as possible receptacles of the transmigrating spirit well

illustrates the conception of souls of plants. The idea is one known to

lower races in a district of the world which has been under Hindu

influence. Thus we hear among the Dayaks of Borneo of the human soul

entering the trunks of trees, where it may be seen damp and blood-like,

but no longer personal and sentient, or of its being re-born from an

animal which has eaten of the bark, flower, or fruit;[32] and the

Santals of Bengal are said to fancy that uncharitable men and childless

women are eaten eternally by worms and snakes, while the good enter into

fruit-bearing trees.[33] But it is an open question how far these and

the Hindu ideas of vegetable transmigration can be considered as

independent. A curious commentary on the Hindu working out of the

conception of plant-souls is to be found in a passage in a 17th-century

work, which describes certain Brahmans of the Coromandel Coast as eating

fruits, but being careful not to pull the plants up by the roots, lest

they should dislodge a soul; but few, it is remarked, are so scrupulous

as this, and the consideration has occurred to them that souls in roots

and herbs are most vile and abject bodies, so that if dislodged they may

become better off by entering into the bodies of men or beasts.[34]

Moreover, the Brahmanic doctrine of souls transmigrating into inert

things has in like manner a bearing on the savage theory of

object-souls.[35]

Buddhism, like the Brahmanism from which it seceded, habitually

recognized transmigration between superhuman and human beings and the

lower animals, and in an exceptional way recognized a degradation even

into a plant or a thing. How the Buddhist mind elaborated the doctrine

of metempsychosis, may be seen in the endless legends of Gautama himself

undergoing his 550 births, suffering pain and misery through countless

ages to gain the power of freeing sentient beings from the misery

inherent in all existence. Four times he became Maha Brahma, twenty

times the dewa Sekra, and many times or few he passed through such

stages as a hermit, a king, a rich man, a slave, a potter, a gambler, a

curer of snake bites, an ape, an elephant, a bull, a serpent, a snipe, a

fish, a frog, the dewa or genius of a tree. At last, when he became the

supreme Buddha, his mind, like a vessel overflowing with honey,

overflowed with the ambrosia of truth, and he proclaimed his triumph

over life:—

‘Painful are repeated births.

O house-builder! I have seen thee,

Thou canst not build again a house for me.

Thy rafters are broken

Thy roof-timbers are shattered.

My mind is detached,

I have attained to the extinction of desire.’

Whether the Buddhists receive the full Hindu doctrine of the migration

of the individual soul from birth to birth, or whether they refine away

into metaphysical subtleties the notion of continued personality, they

do consistently and systematically hold that a man’s life in former

existences is the cause of his now being what he is, while at this

moment he is accumulating merit or demerit whose result will determine

his fate in future lives. Memory, it is true, fails generally to recall

these past births, but memory, as we know, stops short of the beginning

even of this present life. When King Bimsara’s feet were burned and

rubbed with salt by command of his cruel son that he might not walk, why

was this torture inflicted on a man so holy? Because in a previous birth

he had walked near a dagoba with his slippers on, and had trodden on a

priest’s carpet without washing his feet. A man may be prosperous for a

time on account of the merit he has received in former births, but if he

does not continue to keep the precepts, his next birth will be in one of

the hells, he will then be born in this world as a beast, afterwards as

a preta or sprite; a proud man may be born again ugly with large lips,

or as a demon or a worm. The Buddhist theory of ‘karma’ or ‘action,’

which controls the destiny of all sentient beings, not by judicial

reward and punishment, but by the inflexible result of cause into

effect, wherein the present is ever determined by the past in an

unbroken line of causation, is indeed one of the world’s most remarkable

developments of ethical speculation.[36]

Within the classic world, the ancient Egyptians were described as

maintaining a doctrine of migration, whether by successive embodiments

of the immortal soul through creatures of earth, sea, and air, and back

again to man, or by the simpler judicial penalty which sent back the

wicked dead to earth as unclean beasts.[37] The pictures and

hieroglyphic sentences of the Book of the Dead, however, do not afford

the necessary confirmation for these statements, even the mystic

transformations of the soul not being of the nature of transmigrations.

Thus it seems that the theological centre whence the doctrine of moral

metempsychosis may have spread over the ancient cultured religions, must

be sought elsewhere than in Egypt. In Greek philosophy, great teachers

stood forth to proclaim the doctrine in a highly developed form. Plato

had mythic knowledge to convey of souls entering such new incarnations

as their glimpse of real existence had made them fit for, from the body

of a philosopher or a lover down to the body of a tyrant and usurper; of

souls transmigrating into beasts and rising again to man according to

the lives they led; of birds that were light-minded souls; of oysters

suffering in banishment the penalty of utter ignorance. Pythagoras is

made to illustrate in his own person his doctrine of metempsychosis, by

recognizing where it hung in Here’s temple the shield he had carried in

a former birth, when he was that Euphorbos whom Menelaos slew at the

siege of Troy. Afterwards he was Hermotimos, the Klazomenian prophet

whose funeral rites were so prematurely celebrated while his soul was

out, and after that, as Lucian tells the story, his prophetic soul

passed into the body of a cock. Mikyllos asks this cock to tell him

about Troy—were things there really as Homer said? But the cock replies,

‘How should Homer have known, O Mikyllos? When the Trojan war was going

on, he was a camel in Baktria!’[38]

In the later Jewish philosophy, the Kabbalists took up the doctrine of

migration, the _gilgul_ or ‘rolling on’ of souls, and maintained it by

that characteristic method of Biblical interpretation which it is good

to hold up from time to time for a warning to the mystical interpreters

of our own day. The soul of Adam passed into David, and shall pass into

the Messiah, for are not these initials in the very name of Ad(a)m, and

does not Ezekiel say that ‘my servant David shall be their prince for

ever.’ Cain’s soul passed into Jethro, and Abel’s into Moses, and

therefore it was that Jethro gave Moses his daughter to wife. Souls

migrate into beasts and birds and vermin, for is not Jehovah ‘the lord

of the spirits of all flesh’? and he who has done one sin beyond his

good works shall pass into a brute. He who gives a Jew unclean meat to

eat, his soul shall enter into a leaf, blown to and fro by the wind;

‘for ye shall be as an oak whose leaf fadeth;’ and he who speaks ill

words, his soul shall pass into a dumb stone, as did Nabal’s, ‘and he

became a stone.’[39] Within the range of Christian influence the

Manichæans appear as the most remarkable exponents of the

metempsychosis. We hear of their ideas of sinners’ souls transmigrating

into beasts, the viler according to their crimes; that he who kills a

fowl or rat will become a fowl or rat himself; that souls can pass into

plants rooted in the ground, which thus have not only life but sense;

that the souls of reapers pass into beans and barley, to be cut down in

their turn, and thus the elect were careful to explain to the bread when

they ate it, that it was not they who reaped the corn it was made of;

that the souls of the auditors, that is, the spiritually low commonalty

who lived a married life, would pass into melons and cucumbers, to

finish their purification by being eaten by the elect. But these details

come to us from the accounts of bitter theological adversaries, and the

question is, how much of them did the Manichæans really and soberly

believe? Allowing for exaggeration and constructive imputation, there is

some reason to consider the account at least founded on fact. The

Manichæans appear to have recognized a wandering of imperfect souls,

whether or not their composite religion may with its Zarathustrian and

Christian elements have also absorbed in so Indian a shape the doctrine

of purification of souls by migration into animals and plants.[40] In

later times, the doctrine of metempsychosis has been again and again

noticed in a district of South-Western Asia. William of Ruysbroek speaks

of the notion of souls passing from body to body as general among the

mediæval Nestorians, even a somewhat intelligent priest consulting him

as to the souls of brutes, whether they could find refuge elsewhere so

as not to be compelled to labour after death. Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela

records in the 12th century of the Druses of Mount Hermon: ‘They say

that the soul of a virtuous man is transferred to the body of a new-born

child, whereas that of the vicious transmigrates into a dog, or some

other animal.’ Such ideas indeed, seem not yet extinct in the modern

Druse nation. Among the Nassairi, also, transmigration is believed in as

a penance and purification: we hear of migration of unbelievers into

camels, asses, dogs, or sheep, of disobedient Nassairi into Jews,

Sunnis, or Christians, of the faithful into new bodies of their own

people, a few such changes of ‘shirt’ (i.e. body), bringing them to

enter paradise or become stars.[41] An instance of the belief within the

limits of modern Christian Europe may be found among the Bulgarians,

whose superstition is that Turks who have never eaten pork in life will

become wild boars after death. A party assembled to feast on a boar has

been known to throw it all away, for the meat jumped off the spit into

the fire, and a piece of cotton was found in the ears, which the wise

man decided to be a piece of the ci-devant Turk’s turban.[42] Such

cases, however, are exceptional. Metempsychosis never became one of the

great doctrines of Christendom, though not unknown in mediæval

scholasticism, and though maintained by an eccentric theologian here and

there into our own times. It would be strange were it not so. It is in

the very nature of the development of religion that speculations of the

earlier culture should dwindle to survivals, yet be again and again

revived. Doctrines transmigrate, if souls do not; and metempsychosis,

wandering along the course of ages, came at last to animate the souls of

Fourier and Soame Jenyns.[43]

Thus we have traced the theory of metempsychosis in stage after stage of

the world’s civilization, scattered among the native races of America

and Africa, established in the Asiatic nations, especially where

elaborated by the Hindu mind into its system of ethical philosophy,

rising and falling in classic and mediæval Europe, and lingering at last

in the modern world as an intellectual crotchet, of little account but

to the ethnographer who notes it down as an item of evidence for his

continuity of culture. What, we may well ask, was the original cause and

motive of the doctrine of transmigration? Something may be said in

answer, though not at all enough for full explanation. The theory that

ancestral souls return, thus imparting their own likeness of mind and

body to their descendants and kindred, has been already mentioned and

commended as in itself a very reasonable and philosophical hypothesis,

accounting for the phenomenon of family likeness going on from

generation to generation. But why should it have been imagined that

men’s souls could inhabit the bodies of beasts and birds? As has been

already pointed out, savages not unreasonably consider the lower animals

to have souls like their own, and this state of mind makes the idea of a

man’s soul transmigrating into a beast’s body at least seem possible.

But it does not actually suggest the idea. The view stated in a previous

chapter as to the origin of the conception of soul in general, may

perhaps help us here. As it seems that the first conception of souls may

have been that of the souls of men, this being afterwards extended by

analogy to the souls of animals, plants, &c., so it may seem that the

original idea of transmigration was the straightforward and reasonable

one of human souls being re-born in new human bodies, where they are

recognized by family likenesses in successive generations. This notion

may have been afterwards extended to take in re-birth in bodies of

animals, &c. There are some well-marked savage ideas which will fit with

such a course of thought. The half-human features and actions and

characters of animals are watched with wondering sympathy by the savage,

as by the child. The beast is the very incarnation of familiar qualities

of man; and such names as lion, bear, fox, owl, parrot, viper, worm,

when we apply them as epithets to men, condense into a word some leading

feature of a human life. Consistently with this, we see in looking over

details of savage transmigration that the creatures often have an

evident fitness to the character of the human beings whose souls are to

pass into them, so that the savage philosopher’s fancy of transferred

souls offered something like an explanation of the likeness between

beast and man. This comes more clearly into view among the more

civilized races who have worked out the idea of transmigration into

ethical schemes of retribution, where the appropriateness of the

creatures chosen is almost as manifest to the modern critic as it could

have been to the ancient believer. Perhaps the most graphic restoration

of the state of mind in which the theological doctrine of metempsychosis

was worked out in long-past ages, may be found in the writings of a

modern theologian whose spiritualism often follows to the extreme the

intellectual tracks of the lower races. In the spiritual world, says

Emanuel Swedenborg, such persons as have opened themselves for the

admission of the devil and acquired the nature of beasts, becoming foxes

in cunning, &c., appear also at a distance in the proper shape of such

beasts as they represent in disposition.[44] Lastly, one of the most

notable points about the theory of transmigration is its close bearing

upon a thought which lies very deep in the history of philosophy, the

development-theory of organic life in successive stages. An elevation

from the vegetable to the lower animal life, and thence onward through

the higher animals to man, to say nothing of superhuman beings, does not

here require even a succession of distinct individuals, but is brought

by the theory of metempsychosis within the compass of the successive

vegetable and animal lives of a single being.

Here a few words may be said on a subject which cannot be left out of

sight, connecting as it does the two great branches of the doctrine of

future existence, but which it is difficult to handle in definite terms,

and much more to trace historically by comparing the views of lower and

higher races. This is the doctrine of a bodily renewal or resurrection.

To the philosophy of the lower races it is by no means necessary that

the surviving soul should be provided with a new body, for it seems

itself to be of a filmy or vaporous corporeal nature, capable of

carrying on an independent existence like other corporeal creatures.

Savage descriptions of the next world are often such absolute copies of

this, that it is scarcely possible to say whether the dead are or are

not thought of as having bodies like the living; and a few pieces of

evidence of this class are hardly enough to prove the lower races to

hold original and distinct doctrines of corporeal resurrection.[45]

Again, attention must be given to the practice, so common among low and

high races, of preserving relics of the dead, from mere morsels of bone

up to whole mummified bodies. It is well known that the departed soul is

often thought apt to revisit the remains of the body, as is seen in the

well-known pictures of the Egyptian funeral ritual. But the preservation

of these remains, even where it thus involves a permanent connexion

between body and soul, does not necessarily approach more closely to a

bodily resurrection.[46] In discussing the closely allied doctrine of

metempsychosis, I have described the theory of the soul’s transmigration

into a new human body as asserting in fact an earthly resurrection. From

the same point of view, a bodily resurrection in Heaven or Hades is

technically a transmigration of the soul. This is plain among the higher

races, in whose religion these doctrines take at once clearer definition

and more practical import. There are some distinct mentions of bodily

resurrection in the Rig Veda: the dead is spoken of as glorified,

putting on his body (tanu); and it is even promised that the pious man

shall be born in the next world with his entire body (sarvatanû). In

Brahminism and Buddhism, the re-births of souls in bodies to inhabit

heavens and hells are simply included as particular cases of

transmigration. The doctrine of the resurrection appears far back in the

religion of Persia, and is thence supposed to have passed into late

Jewish belief.[47] In early Christianity, the conception of bodily

resurrection is developed with especial strength and fulness in the

Pauline doctrine. For an explicit interpretation of this doctrine, such

as commended itself to the minds of later theologians, it is instructive

to cite the remarkable passage of Origen, where he speaks of ‘corporeal

matter, of which matter, in whatever quality placed, the soul always has

use, now indeed carnal, but afterwards indeed subtler and purer, which

is called spiritual.’[48]

Passing from these metaphysical doctrines of civilized theology, we now

take up a series of beliefs higher in practical moment, and more clearly

conceived in savage thought. There may well have been, and there may

still be, low races destitute of any belief in a Future State.

Nevertheless, prudent ethnographers must often doubt accounts of such,

for this reason, that the savage who declares that the dead live no

more, may merely mean to say that they are dead. When the East African

is asked what becomes of his buried ancestors, the ‘old people,’ he can

reply that ‘they are ended,’ yet at the same time he fully admits that

their ghosts survive.[49] In an account of the religious ideas of the

Zulus, taken down from a native, it is explicitly stated that

Unkulunkulu the Old-Old-One said that people ‘were to die and never rise

again,’ and that he allowed them to ‘die and rise no more.’[50] Knowing

so thoroughly as we now do the theology of the Zulus, whose ghosts not

only survive in the under-world, but are the very deities of the living,

we can put the proper sense to these expressions. But without such

information, we might have mistaken them for denials of the soul’s

existence after death. This objection may even apply to one of the most

formal denials of a future life ever placed on record among an

uncultured race, a poem of the Dinka tribe of the White Nile, concerning

Dendid the Creator:—

‘On the day when Dendid made all things,

He made the sun;

And the sun comes forth, goes down, and comes again:

He made the moon;

And the moon comes forth, goes down, and comes again:

He made the stars;

And the stars come forth, go down, and come again:

He made man;

And man comes forth, goes down into the ground, and comes no more.’

It is to be remarked, however, that the close neighbours of these Dinka,

the Bari, believe that the dead do return to live again on earth, and

the question arises whether it is the doctrine of bodily resurrection,

or the doctrine of the surviving ghost-soul, that the Dinka poem denies.

The missionary Kaufmann says that the Dinka do not believe the

immortality of the soul, that they think it but a breath, and with death

all is over; Brun-Rollet’s contrary authority goes to prove that they do

believe in another life; both leave it an open question whether they

recognize the existence of surviving ghosts.[51]

Looking at the religion of the lower races as a whole, we shall at least

not be ill-advised in taking as one of its general and principal

elements the doctrine of the soul’s Future Life. But here it is needful

to explain, to limit, and to reserve, lest modern theological ideas

should lead us to misconstrue more primitive beliefs. In such enquiries

the phrase ‘immortality of the soul’ is to be avoided as misleading. It

is doubtful how far the lower psychology entertains at all an absolute

conception of immortality, for past and future fade soon into utter

vagueness as the savage mind quits the present to explore them, the

measure of months and years breaks down even within the narrow span of

human life, and the survivor’s thought of the soul of the departed

dwindles and disappears with the personal memory that kept it alive. The

doctrine of the surviving soul may indeed be treated as common to all

known races, though its acceptance is not unanimous. In savage as in

civilized life, dull and careless natures ignore a world to come as too

far off, while sceptical intellects are apt to reject its belief as

wanting proof. There are even statements on record of whole classes

being formally excluded from future life. This may be a matter of social

pride. In the Tonga Islands, according to Mariner, it was held that the

chiefs and nobles would live hereafter in the happy island of Bolotu,

but that the souls of the common people would die with their bodies. So

Captain John Smith relates as to the belief of the Virginians, that the

chiefs went after death beyond the sunset mountains, there to dance and

sing with their predecessors, ‘but the common people they suppose shall

not live after death.’ In the record of a missionary examination of the

Nicaraguans, they are made to state their belief that if a man lived

well, his soul would ascend to dwell among the gods, but if ill it would

perish with the body, and there would be an end of it.[52] None of these

accounts, however, agree with what is known of the religion of kindred

peoples, Polynesian, Algonquin, or Aztec. But granted that the soul

survives the death of the body, instance after instance from the records

of the lower culture shows this soul to be regarded as a mortal being,

liable like the body itself to accident and death. The Greenlanders

pitied the poor souls who must pass in winter or in storm the dreadful

mountain where the dead descend to reach the other world, for then a

soul is like to come to harm, and die the other death where there is

nothing left, and this is to them the dolefullest thing of all.[53] Thus

the Fijians tell of the fight which the ghost of a departed warrior must

wage with the soul-killing Samu and his brethren; this is the contest

for which the dead man is armed by burying the war-club with his corpse,

and if he conquers, the way is open for him to the judgment-seat of

Ndengei, but if he is wounded, his doom is to wander among the

mountains, and if killed in the encounter he is cooked and eaten by Samu

and his brethren. But the souls of unmarried Fijians will not even

survive to stand this wager of battle; such try in vain to steal at low

water round to the edge of the reef past the rocks where Nangananga,

destroyer of wifeless souls, sits laughing at their hopeless efforts,

and asking them if they think the tide will never flow again, till at

last the rising flood drives the shivering ghosts to the beach, and

Nangananga dashes them in pieces on the great black stone, as one

shatters rotten firewood.[54] Such, again, were the tales told by the

Guinea negroes of the life or death of departed souls. Either the great

priest before whom they must appear after death would judge them,

sending the good in peace to a happy place, but killing the wicked a

second time with the club that stands ready before his dwelling; or else

the departed shall be judged by their god at the river of death, to be

gently wafted by him to a pleasant land if they have kept feasts and

oaths and abstained from forbidden meats, but if not, to be plunged into

the river by the god, and thus drowned and buried in eternal

oblivion.[55] Even common water can drown a negro ghost, if we may

believe the missionary Cavazzi’s story of the Matamba widows being

ducked in the river or pond to drown off the souls of their departed

husbands, who might still be hanging about them, clinging closest to the

best-loved wives. After this ceremony, they went and married again.[56]

From such details it appears that the conception of some souls suffering

extinction at death or dying a second death, a thought still as

heretofore familiar to speculative theology, is not unknown in the lower

culture.

The soul, as recognized in the philosophy of the lower races, may be

defined as an ethereal surviving being, conceptions of which preceded

and led up to the more transcendental theory of the immaterial and

immortal soul, which forms part of the theology of higher nations. It is

principally the ethereal surviving soul of early culture that has now to

be studied in the religions of savages and barbarians and the folk-lore

of the civilized world. That this soul should be looked on as surviving

beyond death is a matter scarcely needing elaborate argument. Plain

experience is there to teach it to every savage; his friend or his enemy

is dead, yet still in dream or open vision he sees the spectral form

which is to his philosophy a real objective being, carrying personality

as it carries likeness. This thought of the soul’s continued existence

is, however, but the gateway into a complex region of belief. The

doctrines which, separate or compounded, make up the scheme of future

existence among particular tribes, are principally these: the theories

of lingering, wandering, and returning ghosts, and of souls dwelling on

or below or above the earth in a spirit-world, where existence is

modelled upon the earthly life, or raised to higher glory, or placed

under reversed conditions, and lastly, the belief in a division between

happiness and misery of departed souls, by a retribution for deeds done

in life, determined in a judgment after death.

‘All argument is against it; but all belief is for it,’ said Dr. Johnson

of the apparition of departed spirits. The doctrine that ghost-souls of

the dead hover among the living is indeed rooted in the lowest levels of

savage culture, extends through barbaric life almost without a break,

and survives largely and deeply in the midst of civilization. From the

myriad details of travellers, missionaries, historians, theologians,

spiritualists, it may be laid down as an admitted opinion, as wide in

distribution as it is natural in thought, that the two chief

hunting-grounds of the departed soul are the scenes of its fleshly life

and the burial place of its body. As in North America the Chickasaws

believed that the spirits of the dead in their bodily shape moved about

among the living in great joy; as the Aleutian islanders fancied the

souls of the departed walking unseen among their kindred, and

accompanying them in their journeys by sea and land; as Africans think

that souls of the dead dwell in their midst, and eat with them at meal

times; as Chinese pay their respects to kindred spirits present in the

hall of ancestors;[57] so multitudes in Europe and America live in an

atmosphere that swarms with ghostly shapes—spirits of the dead, who sit

over against the mystic by his midnight fire, rap and write in

spirit-circles, and peep over girls’ shoulders as they scare themselves

into hysterics with ghost-stories. Almost throughout the vast range of

animistic religion, we shall find the souls of the departed hospitably

entertained by the survivors on set occasions, and manes-worship, so

deep and strong among the faiths of the world, recognizes with a

reverence not without fear and trembling those ancestral spirits which,

powerful for good or ill, manifest their presence among mankind.

Nevertheless death and life dwell but ill together, and from savagery

onward there is recorded many a device by which the survivors have

sought to rid themselves of household ghosts. Though the unhappy savage

custom of deserting houses after a decease may often be connected with

other causes, such as horror or abnegation of all things belonging to

the dead, there are cases where it appears that the place is simply

abandoned to the ghost. In Old Calabar it was customary for the son to

leave his fathers’ house to decay, but after two years he might rebuild

it, the ghost being thought by that time to have departed;[58] the

Hottentots abandoned the dead man’s house, and were said to avoid

entering it lest the ghost should be within;[59] the Yakuts let the hut

fall in ruins where any one had expired, thinking it the habitation of

demons;[60] the Karens were said to destroy their villages to escape the

dangerous neighbourhood of departed souls.[61] Such proceedings,

however, scarcely extend beyond the limits of barbarism, and only a

feeble survival of the old thought lingers on into civilization, where

from time to time a haunted house is left to fall in ruins, abandoned to

a ghostly tenant who cannot keep it in repair. But even in the lowest

culture we find flesh holding its own against spirit, and at higher

stages the householder rids himself with little scruple of an unwelcome

inmate. The Greenlanders would carry the dead out by the window, not by

the door, while an old woman, waving a firebrand behind, cried

‘piklerrukpok!’ i.e., ‘there is nothing more to be had here!’;[62] the

Hottentots removed the dead from the hut by an opening broken out on

purpose, to prevent him from finding the way back;[63] the Siamese, with

the same intention, break an opening through the house wall to carry the

coffin through, and then hurry it at full speed thrice round the

house;[64] in Russia the Chuwashes fling a red-hot stone after the

corpse is carried out, for an obstacle to bar the soul from coming

back;[65] so Brandenburg peasants pour out a pail of water at the door

after the coffin, to prevent the ghost from walking; and Pomeranian

mourners returning from the churchyard leave behind the straw from the

hearse that the wandering soul may rest there, and not come back so far

as home.[66] In the ancient and mediæval world, men habitually invoked

supernatural aid beyond such material shifts as these, calling in the

priest to lay or banish intruding ghosts, nor is this branch of the

exorcist’s art even yet forgotten. There is, and always has been, a

prevalent feeling that disembodied souls, especially such as have

suffered a violent or untimely death, are baneful and malicious beings.

As Meiners suggests in his ‘History of Religions,’ they were driven

unwillingly from their bodies, and have carried into their new existence

an angry longing for revenge. No wonder that mankind should so generally

agree that if the souls of the dead must linger in the world at all,

their fitting abode should be not the haunts of the living but the

resting-places of the dead.

After all, it scarcely seems to the lower animistic philosophy that the

connexion between body and soul is utterly broken by death. Various

wants may keep the soul from its desired rest, and among the chief of

these is when its mortal remains have not had the funeral rites. Hence

the deep-lying belief that the ghosts of such will walk. Among some

Australian tribes the ‘ingna,’ or evil spirits, human in shape, but with

long tails and long upright ears, are mostly souls of departed natives,

whose bodies were left to lie unburied or whose death the avenger of

blood did not expiate, and thus they have to prowl on the face of the

earth, and about the place of death, with no gratification but to harm

the living.[67] In New Zealand, the ideas were to be found that the

souls of the dead were apt to linger near the bodies, and that the

spirits of men left unburied or killed in battle and eaten, would

wander; and the bringing such malignant souls to dwell within the sacred

burial-enclosure was a task for the priest to accomplish with his

charms.[68] Among the Iroquois of North America the spirit also stays

near the body for a time, and ‘unless the rites of burial were

performed, it was believed that the spirits of the dead hovered for a

time upon the earth, in a state of great unhappiness. Hence their

extreme solicitude to procure the bodies of the slain in battle.’[69]

Among Brazilian tribes, the wandering shadows of the dead are said to be

considered unresting till burial.[70] In Turanian regions of North Asia,

the spirits of the dead who have no resting-place in earth are thought

of as lingering above ground, especially where their dust remains.[71]

South Asia has such beliefs: the Karens say that the ghosts who wander

on earth are not the spirits of those who go to Plu, the land of the

dead, but of infants, of such as died by violence, of the wicked, and of

those who by accident have not been buried or burned;[72] the Siamese

fear as unkindly spirits the souls of such as died a violent death or

were not buried with the proper rites, and who desiring expiation,

invisibly terrify their descendants.[73] Nowhere in the world had such

thoughts a stronger hold than in classic antiquity, where it was the

most sacred of duties to give the body its funeral rites, that the shade

should not flit moaning near the gates of Hades, nor wander in the

dismal crowd along the banks of Acheron.[74] An Australian or a Karen

would have taken in the full significance of the fatal accusation

against the Athenian commanders, that they abandoned the bodies of their

dead in the sea-fight of Arginousai. The thought is not unknown to

Slavonic folk-lore: ‘Ha! with the shriek the spirit flutters from the

mouth, flies up to the tree, from tree to tree, hither and thither till

the dead is burned.’[75] In mediæval Europe the classic stories of

ghosts that haunt the living till laid by rites of burial pass here and

there into new legends, where, under a changed dispensation, the doleful

wanderer now asks Christian burial in consecrated earth.[76] It is

needless to give here elaborate details of the world-wide thought that

when the corpse is buried, exposed, burned, or otherwise disposed of

after the accepted custom of the land, the ghost accompanies its relics.

The soul stays near the Polynesian or the American Indian burial-place;

it dwells among the twigs and listens joyfully to the singing birds in

the trees where Siberian tribes suspend their dead; it lingers by the

Samoyed’s scaffolded coffin; it haunts the Dayak’s place of burial or

burning; it inhabits the little soul-hut above the Malagasy grave, or

the Peruvian house of sun-dried bricks; it is deposited in the Roman

tomb (animamque sepulchro condimus); it comes back for judgment into the

body of the later Israelite and the Moslem; it inhabits, as a divine

ancestral spirit, the palace-tombs of the old classic and new Asiatic

world; it is kept down by the huge cairn raised over Antar’s body lest

his mighty spirit should burst forth, by the iron nails with which the

Cheremiss secures the corpse in its coffin, by the stake that pins down

the suicide’s body at the four-cross way. And through all the changes of

religious thought from first to last in the course of human history, the

hovering ghosts of the dead make the midnight burial-ground a place

where men’s flesh creeps with terror. Not to discuss here the general

subject of funeral rites of mankind, of which only part of the

multifarious details are directly relevant to the present purpose, a

custom may be selected which is admirably adapted for the study of

animistic religion, at once from the clear conception it gives of the

belief in disembodied souls present among the living, and from the

distinct line of ethnographic continuity in which it may be traced

onward from the lower to the higher culture. This is the custom of

Feasts of the Dead.

Among the funeral offerings described in the last chapter of which the

purpose more or less distinctly appears to be that the departed soul

shall take them away in some ghostly or ideal manner, or that they shall

by some means be conveyed to him in his distant spirit-home, there are

given supplies of food and drink. But the feasts of the dead with which

we are now concerned are given on a different principle; they are, so to

speak, to be consumed on the premises. They are set out in some proper

place, especially near the tombs or in the dwelling-houses, and there

the souls of the dead come and satisfy themselves. In North America,

among Algonquins who held that one of a man’s two souls abides with the

body after death, the provisions brought to the grave were intended for

the nourishment of this soul; tribes would make offerings to ancestors

of part of any dainty food, and an Indian who fell by accident into the

fire would believe that the spirits of his ancestors pushed him in for

neglecting to make due offerings.[77] The minds of the Hurons were

filled with fancies not less lifelike than this. It seemed to them that

the dead man’s soul, in his proper human figure, walked in front of the

corpse as they carried it to the burial-ground, there to dwell till the

great feast of the dead; but meanwhile it would come and walk by night

in the village, and eat the remnants in the kettles, wherefore some

would not eat of these, nor touch the food at funeral feasts—though some

indeed would eat all.[78] In Madagascar, the elegant little upper

chamber in King Radama’s mausoleum was furnished with a table and two

chairs, and a bottle of wine, a bottle of water, and two tumblers were

placed there conformably with the ideas entertained by most of the

natives, that the ghost of the departed monarch might occasionally visit

the resting-place of his body, meet with the spirit of his father, and

partake of what he was known to be fond of in his lifetime.[79] The

Wanika of East Africa set a coco-nut shell full of rice and tembo near

the grave for the ‘koma’ or shade, which cannot exist without food and

drink.[80] In West Africa the Efik cook food and leave it on the table

in the little shed or ‘devil-house’ near the grave, and thither not only

the spirit of the deceased, but the spirits of the slaves sacrificed at

his funeral, come to partake of it.[81] Farther south, in the Congo

district, the custom has been described of making a channel into the

tomb to the head or mouth of the corpse, whereby to send down month by

month the offerings of food and drink.[82]

Among rude Asiatic tribes, the Bodo of North-East India thus celebrate

the last funeral rites. The friends repair to the grave, and the nearest

of kin to the deceased, taking an individual’s usual portion of food and

drink, solemnly presents it to the dead with these words, ‘Take and eat,

heretofore you have eaten and drunk with us, you can do so no more; you

were one of us, you can be so no longer; we come no more to you, come

you not to us.’ Thereupon each of the party breaks off a bracelet of

thread put on his wrist for this purpose, and casts it on the grave, a

speaking symbol of breaking the bond of fellowship, and ‘next the party

proceed to the river and bathe, and having thus lustrated themselves,

they repair to the banquet and eat, drink, and make merry as though they

never were to die.’[83] With more continuance of affection, Naga tribes

of Assam celebrate their funeral feasts month by month, laying food and

drink on the graves of the departed.[84] In the same region of the

world, the Kol tribes of Chota Nagpur are remarkable for their pathetic

reverence for their dead. When a Ho or Munda has been burned on the

funeral pile, collected morsels of his bones are carried in procession

with a solemn, ghostly, sliding step, keeping time to the deep-sounding

drum, and when the old woman who carries the bones on her bamboo tray

lowers it from time to time, then girls who carry pitchers and brass

vessels mournfully reverse them to show that they are empty; thus the

remains are taken to visit every house in the village, and every

dwelling of a friend or relative for miles, and the inmates come out to

mourn and praise the goodness of the departed; the bones are carried to

all the dead man’s favourite haunts, to the fields he cultivated, to the

grove he planted, to the threshing-floor where he worked, to the village

dance-room where he made merry. At last they are taken to the grave, and

buried in an earthen vase upon a store of food, covered with one of

those huge stone slabs which European visitors wonder at in the

districts of the aborigines in India. Besides these, monumental stones

are set up outside the village to the memory of men of note; they are

fixed on an earthen plinth, where the ghost, resting in its walks among

the living, is supposed to sit shaded by the pillar. The Kheriahs have

collections of these monuments in the little enclosures round their

houses, and offerings and libations are constantly made at them. With

what feelings such rites are celebrated may be judged from this Ho

dirge:—

‘We never scolded you; never wronged you;

Come to us back!

We ever loved and cherished you; and have lived long together

Under the same roof;

Desert it not now!

The rainy nights, and the cold blowing days, are coming on;

Do not wander here!

Do not stand by the burnt ashes; come to us again!

You cannot find shelter under the peepul, when the rain comes down.

The saul will not shield you from the cold bitter wind.

Come to your home!

It is swept for you, and clean; and we are there who loved you ever;

And there is rice put for you; and water;

Come home, come home, come to us again!’

Among the Kol tribes this kindly hospitality to ancestral souls passes

on into the belief and ceremony of full manes-worship: votive offerings

are made to the ‘old folks’ when their descendants go on a journey, and

when there is sickness in the family it is generally they who are first

propitiated.[85] Among Turanian races, the Chuwash put food and napkins

on the grave, saying, ‘Rise at night and eat your fill, and there ye

have napkins to wipe your mouths!’ while the Cheremiss simply said,

‘That is for you, ye dead, there ye have food and drink!’ In this Tatar

region we hear of offerings continued year after year, and even of

messengers sent back by a horde to carry offerings to the tombs of their

forefathers in the old land whence they had emigrated.[86]

Details of this ancient rite are to be traced from the level of these

rude races far upward in civilization. South-East Asia is full of it,

and the Chinese may stand as its representative. He keeps his coffined

parent for years, serving him with meals as if alive. He summons

ancestral souls with prayer and beat of drum to feed on the meat and

drink set out on special days when they are thought to return home. He

even gives entertainments for the benefit of destitute and unfortunate

souls in the lower regions, such as those of lepers and beggars.

Lanterns are lighted to show them the way, a feast is spread for them,

and with characteristic fancy, some victuals are left over for any blind

or feeble spirits who may be late, and a pail of gruel is provided for

headless souls, with spoons for them to put it down their throats with.

Such proceedings culminate in the so-called Universal Rescue, now and

then celebrated, when a little house is built for the expected visitors,

with separate accommodation and bath-rooms for male and female

ghosts.[87] The ancient Egyptian would set out his provision of cakes

and trussed ducks on reed scaffolds in the tomb, or would even keep the

mummy in the house to be present as a guest at the feast, σύνδειπνον καὶ

συμπότην ἐποιήσατο, as Lucian says.[88] The Hindu, as of old, offers to

the dead the funeral cakes, places before the door the earthen vessels

of water for him to bathe in, of milk for him to drink, and celebrates

at new and full moon the solemn presentation of rice-cakes made with

ghee, with its attendant ceremonies so important for the soul’s release

from its twelvemonth’s sojourn with Yama in Hades, and its transition to

the Heaven of the Pitaras, the Fathers.[89] In the classic world such

rites were represented by funeral feasts and oblations of food.[90]

In Christian times there manifests itself that interesting kind of

survival which, keeping up the old ceremony in form, has adapted its

motive to new thoughts and feelings. The classic funeral oblations

became Christian, the silicernium was succeeded by the feast held at the

martyr’s tomb. Faustus inveighs against the Christians for carrying on

the ancient rites: ‘Their sacrifices indeed ye have turned into

love-feasts, their idols into martyrs whom with like vows ye worship; ye

appease the shades of the dead with wine and meals, ye celebrate the

Gentiles’ solemn days with them, such as calends and solstices,—of their

life certainly ye have changed nought,’[91] and so forth. The story of

Monica shows how the custom of laying food on the tomb for the manes

passed into the ceremony, like to it in form, of setting food and drink

to be sanctified by the sepulchre of a Christian saint. Saint-Foix, who

wrote in the time of Louis XIV., has left us an account of the

ceremonial after the death of a King of France, during the forty days

before the funeral when his wax effigy lay in state. They continued to

serve him at meal-times as though still alive, the officers laid the

table, and brought the dishes, the maître d’hôtel handed the napkin to

the highest lord present to be presented to the king, a prelate blessed

the table, the basins of water were handed to the royal arm-chair, the

cup was served in its due course, and grace was said in the accustomed

manner, save that there was added to it the De Profundis.[92] Spaniards

still offer bread and wine on the tombs of those they love, on the

anniversary of their decease.[93] The conservative Eastern Church still

holds to ancient rite. The funeral feast is served in Russia, with its

tables for the beggars, laden with fish pasties and bowls of shchi and

jugs of kvas, its more delicate dinner for friends and priests, its

incense and chants of ‘everlasting remembrance’; and even the repetition

of the festival on the ninth, and twentieth, and fortieth day are not

forgotten. The offerings of saucers of kutiya or kolyvo are still made

in the church; this used to be of parboiled wheat and was deposited over

the body, it is now made of boiled rice and raisins, sweetened with

honey. In their usual mystic fashion, the Orthodox Christians now

explain away into symbolism this remnant of primitive offering to the

dead: the honey is heavenly sweetness, the shrivelled raisins will be

full beauteous grapes, the grain typifies the resurrection, ‘that which

thou sowest is not quickened except it die.’[94]

In the calendar of many a people, differing widely as they may in race

and civilization, there are to be found special yearly festivals of the

dead. Their rites are much the same as those performed on other days for

individuals; their season differs in different districts, but seems to

have particular associations with harvest-time and the fall of the year,

and with the year’s end as reckoned at midwinter or in early spring.[95]

The Karens make their annual offerings to the dead in the ‘month of

shades,’ that is, December;[96] the Kocch of North Bengal every year at

harvest-home offer fruits and a fowl to deceased parents;[97] the Barea

of East Africa celebrate in November the feast of Thiyot, at once a

feast of general peace and merry-making, of thanksgiving for the

harvest, and of memorial for the deceased, for each of whom a little

pot-full of beer is set out two days, to be drunk at last by the

survivors;[98] in West Africa we hear of the feast of the dead at the

time of yam-harvest;[99] at the end of the year the Haitian negroes take

food to the graves for the shades to eat, ‘manger zombi,’ as they

say.[100] The Roman Feralia and Lemuralia were held in February and

May.[101] In the last five or ten days of their year the Zoroastrians

hold their feasts for departed relatives, when souls come back to the

world to visit the living, and receive from them offerings of food and

clothing.[102] The custom of setting empty seats at the St. John’s Eve

feast, for the departed souls of kinsfolk, is said to have lasted on in

Europe to the seventeenth century. Spring is the season of the

time-honoured Slavonic rite of laying food on the graves of the dead.

The Bulgarians hold a feast in the cemetery on Palm Sunday, and, after

much eating and drinking, leave the remains upon the graves of their

friends, who, they are persuaded, will eat them during the night. In

Russia such scenes may still be watched on the two appointed days called

Parents’ Days. The higher classes have let the rite sink to prayer at

the graves of lost relatives, and giving alms to the beggars who flock

to the cemeteries. But the people still ‘howl’ for the dead, and set out

on their graves a handkerchief for a tablecloth, with gingerbread, eggs,

curd-tarts, and even vodka, on it; when the weeping is over, they eat up

the food, especially commemorating the dead in Russian manner by

partaking of his favourite dainty, and if he were fond of a glass, the

vodka is sipped with the ejaculation, ‘The Kingdom of Heaven be his! He

loved a drink, the deceased!’[103] When Odilo, Abbot of Cluny, at the

end of the tenth century, instituted the celebration of All Souls’ Day

(November 2),[104] he set on foot one of those revivals which have so

often given the past a new lease of life. The Western Church at large

took up the practice, and round it there naturally gathered surviving

remnants of the primitive rite of banquets to the dead. The accusation

against the early Christians, that they appeased the shades of the dead

with feasts like the Gentiles, would not be beside the mark now, fifteen

hundred years later. On the eve of All Souls’ begins, within the limits

of Christendom, a commemoration of the dead which combines some touches

of pathetic imagination with relics of savage animism scarcely to be

surpassed in Africa or the South Sea Islands. In Italy the day is given

to feasting and drinking in honour of the dead, while skulls and

skeletons in sugar and paste form appropriate children’s toys. In Tyrol,

the poor souls released from purgatory fire for the night may come and

smear their burns with the melted fat of the ‘soul light’ on the hearth,

or cakes are left for them on the table, and the room is kept warm for

their comfort. Even in Paris the souls of the departed come to partake

of the food of the living. In Brittany the crowd pours into the

churchyard at evening, to kneel bareheaded at the graves of dead

kinsfolk, to fill the hollow of the tombstone with holy water, or to

pour libations of milk upon it. All night the church bells clang, and

sometimes a solemn procession of the clergy goes round to bless the

graves. In no household that night is the cloth removed, for the supper

must be left for the souls to come and take their part, nor must the

fire be put out, where they will come to warm themselves. And at last,

as the inmates retire to rest, there is heard at the door a doleful

chant—it is the souls, who, borrowing the voices of the parish poor,

have come to ask the prayers of the living.[105]

If we ask how the spirits of the dead are in general supposed to feed on

the viands set before them, we come upon difficult questions, which will

be met with again in discussing the theory of sacrifice. Even where the

thought is certainly that the departed soul eats, this thought may be

very indefinite, with far less of practical intention in it than of

childish make-believe. Now and then, however, the sacrificers themselves

offer closer definitions of their meaning. The idea of the ghost

actually devouring the material food is not unexampled. Thus, in North

America, Algonquin Indians considered that the shadow-like souls of the

dead can still eat and drink, often even telling Father Le Jeune that

they had found in the morning meat gnawed in the night by the souls.

More recently, we read that some Potawatomis will leave off providing

the supply of food at the grave if it lies long untouched, it being

concluded that the dead no longer wants it, but has found a rich

hunting-ground in the other world.[106] In Africa, again, Father Cavazzi

records of the Congo people furnishing their dead with supplies of

provisions, that they could not be persuaded that souls did not consume

material food.[107] In Europe the Esths, offering food for the dead on

All Souls’, are said to have rejoiced if they found in the morning that

any of it was gone.[108] A less gross conception is that the soul

consumes the steam or savour of the food, or its essence or spirit. It

is said to have been with such purpose that the Maoris placed food by

the dead man’s side, and some also with him in the grave.[109] The idea

is well displayed among the natives in Mexican districts, where the

souls who came to the annual feast are described as hovering over and

smelling the food set out for them, or sucking out its nutritive

quality.[110] The Hindu entreats the manes to quaff the sweet essence of

the offered food; thinking on them, he slowly sets the dish of rice

before the Brahmans, and while they silently eat the hot food, the

ancestral spirits take their part of the feast.[111] At the old Slavonic

meals for the dead, we read of the survivors sitting in silence and

throwing morsels under the table, fancying that they could hear the

spirits rustle, and see them feed on the smell and steam of the viands.

One account describes the mourners at the funeral banquet inviting in

the departed soul thought to be standing outside the door, and every

guest throwing morsels and pouring drink under the table, for him to

refresh himself. What lay on the ground was not picked up, but was left

for friendless and kinless souls. When the meal was over, the priest

rose from table, swept out the house, and hunted out the souls of the

dead ‘like fleas,’ with these words, ‘Ye have eaten and drunken, souls,

now go, now go!’[112] Many travellers have described the imagination

with which the Chinese make such offerings. It is that the spirits of

the dead consume the impalpable essence of the food, leaving behind its

coarse material substance, wherefore the dutiful sacrificers, having set

out sumptuous feasts for ancestral souls, allow them a proper time to

satisfy their appetite, and then fall to themselves.[113] The Jesuit

Father Christoforo Borri suggestively translates the native idea into

his own scholastic phraseology. In Cochin China, according to him,

people believed ‘that the souls of the dead have need of corporeal

sustenance and maintenance, wherefore several times a year, according to

their custom, they make splendid and sumptuous banquets, children to

their deceased parents, husbands to their wives, friends to their

friends, waiting a long while for the dead guest to come and sit down at

table to eat.’ The missionaries argued against this proceeding, but were

met by ridicule of their ignorance, and the reply ‘that there were two

things in the food, one the substance, and the other the accidents of

quantity, quality, smell, taste, and the like. The immaterial souls of

the dead, taking for themselves the substance of the food, which being

immaterial is food suited to the incorporeal soul, left only in the

dishes the accidents which corporeal senses perceive; for this the dead

had no need of corporeal instruments, as we have said.’ Thereupon the

Jesuit proceeds to remark, as to the prospect of conversion of these

people, ‘it may be judged from the distinction they make between the

accidents and the substance of the food which they prepare for the

dead,’ that it will not be very difficult to prove to them the mystery

of the Eucharist.[114] Now to peoples among whom prevails the rite of

feasts of the dead, whether they offer the food in mere symbolic

pretence, or whether they consider the souls really to feed on it in

this spiritual way (as well as in the cases inextricably mixed up with

these, where the offering is spiritually conveyed away to the world of

spirits), it can be of little consequence what becomes of the gross

material food. When the Kafir sorcerer, in cases of sickness, declares

that the shades of ancestors demand a particular cow, the beast is

slaughtered and left shut up for a time for the shades to eat, or for

its spirit to go to the land of shades, and then is taken out to be

eaten by the sacrificers.[115] So, in more civilized Japan, when the

survivors have placed their offering of unboiled rice and water in a

hollow made for the purpose in a stone of the tomb, it seems to them no

matter that the poor or the birds really carry off the grain.[116]

Such rites as these are especially exposed to dwindle in survival. The

offerings of meals and feasts to the dead may be traced at their last

stage into mere traditional ceremonies, at most tokens of affectionate

remembrance of the dead, or works of charity to the living. The Roman

Feralia in Ovid’s time were a striking example of such transition, for

while the idea was recognized that the ghosts fed upon the offerings,

‘nunc posito pascitur umbra cibo,’ yet there were but ‘parva munera,’

fruits and grains of salt, and corn soaked in wine, set out for their

meal in the middle of the road. ‘Little the manes ask, the pious thought

stands instead of the rich gift, for Styx holds no greedy gods:’—

‘Parva petunt manes. Pietas pro divite grata est

Munere. Non avidos Styx habet ima deos.

Tegula porrectis satis est velata coronis,

Et sparsae fruges, parcaque mica salis,

Inque mero mollita ceres, violaeque solutae:

Haec habeat media testa relicta via.

Nec majora veto. Sed et his placabilis umbra est.’[117]

Still farther back, in old Chinese history, Confucius had been called on

to give an opinion as to the sacrifices to the dead. Maintainer of all

ancient rites as he was, he stringently kept up this, ‘he sacrificed to

the dead as if they were present,’ but when he was asked if the dead had

knowledge of what was done or no, he declined to answer the question;

for if he replied yes, then dutiful descendants would injure their

substance by sacrifices, and if no, then undutiful children would leave

their parents unburied. The evasion was characteristic of the teacher

who expressed his theory of worship in this maxim, ‘to give oneself

earnestly to the duties due to men, and, while respecting spiritual

beings, to keep aloof from them, may be called wisdom.’ It is said that

in our own time the Taepings have made a step beyond Confucius; they

have forbidden the sacrifices to the spirits of the dead, yet keep up

the rite of visiting their tombs on the customary day, for prayer and

the renewal of vows.[118] How funeral offerings may pass into

commemorative banquets and feasts to the poor, has been shown already.

If we seek in England for vestiges of the old rite of funeral sacrifice,

we may find a lingering survival into modern centuries, doles of bread

and drink given to the poor at funerals, and ‘soul-mass cakes’ which

peasant girls perhaps to this day beg for at farmhouses with the

traditional formula,

‘Soul, soul, for a soul cake,

Pray you, mistress, a soul cake.’[119]

Were it not for our knowledge of the intermediate stages through which

these fragments of old custom have come down, it would seem far-fetched

indeed to trace their origin back to the savage and barbaric times of

the institution of feasts of departed souls.

Footnote 1:

Brebeuf in ‘Rel. des Jés. dans la Nouvelle France,’ 1636, p. 130;

Charlevoix, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. vi. p. 75. See Brinton, p. 253.

Footnote 2:

Waitz, vol. iii. p. 195, see p. 213. Morse, ‘Report on Indian

Affairs,’ p. 345.

Footnote 3:

Mayne, ‘British Columbia,’ p. 181.

Footnote 4:

Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ pp. 248, 258, see p. 212. See also Turner,

‘Polynesia,’ p. 353; Meiners, vol. ii. p. 793.

Footnote 5:

Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 28.

Footnote 6:

Bastian, ‘Zur vergl. Psychologie,’ in Lazarus and Steinthal’s

‘Zeitschrift,’ vol. v. p. 160, &c., also Papuas and other races.

Footnote 7:

Burton, ‘W. & W. fr. W. Afr.’ p. 376.

Footnote 8:

Krapf, ‘E. Afr.’ p. 201.

Footnote 9:

J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ p. 210; see also R. Clarke, ‘Sierra Leone,’ p.

159.

Footnote 10:

Bastian, l. c.

Footnote 11:

Macpherson, p. 72; also Tickell in ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ vol. ix.

pp. 793, &c.; Dalton in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi. p. 22 (similar rite

of Mundas and Oraons).

Footnote 12:

Klemm, ‘C. G.’ vol. iii. p. 77; K. Leems, ‘Lapper,’ c. xiv.

Footnote 13:

R. Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 284; see Shortland, ‘Traditions,’ p. 145;

Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 353; Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 279; see

also p. 276 (Samoyeds). Compare Charlevoix, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. v.

p. 426; Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 353; Kracheninnikow, ii. 117. See

Plath, ‘Rel. der alten Chinesen,’ ii. p. 98.

Footnote 14:

Grey, ‘Australia,’ vol. i. p. 301, vol. ii. p. 363 (native’s

accusation against some foreign sailors who had assaulted him,

‘_djanga_ Taal-wurt kyle-gut bomb-gur,’—‘one of the dead struck

Taal-wurt under the ear,’ &c. The word _djanga_ = the dead, the

spirits of deceased persons (see Grey, ‘Vocab. of S. W. Australia’),

had come to be the usual term for a European). Lang, ‘Queensland,’ pp.

34, 336; Bonwick, ‘Tasmanians,’ p. 183; Scherzer, ‘Voy. of Novara,’

vol. iii. p. 34; Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 222, ‘Mensch,’ vol. iii.

pp. 362-3, and in Lazarus and Steinthal’s ‘Zeitschrift,’ l. c.;

Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ p. 424.

Footnote 15:

Römer, ‘Guinea,’ p. 85; Brun-Rollet, ‘Nil Blanc,’ &c. p. 234.

Footnote 16:

Sproat, ‘Savage Life,’ ch. xviii., xix., xxi. Souls of the dead appear

in dreams, either in human or animal forms, p. 174. See also Brinton,

p. 145.

Footnote 17:

Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part iii. p. 113.

Footnote 18:

Hayes, ‘Arctic Boat Journey,’ p. 198.

Footnote 19:

Brinton, ‘Myths of New World,’ p. 102.

Footnote 20:

Brebeuf in ‘Rel. des Jés.’ 1636, p. 104.

Footnote 21:

Morgan, ‘Iroquois,’ p. 174.

Footnote 22:

Clavigero, ‘Messico,’ vol. ii. p. 5.

Footnote 23:

Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol. i. p. 602; Markham in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’

vol. iii. p. 195.

Footnote 24:

Dobrizhoffer, ‘Abipones,’ vol. ii. pp. 74, 270.

Footnote 25:

Coreal in Brinton, l. c. See also J. G. Müller, pp. 139 (Natchez), 223

(Caribs), 402 (Peru).

Footnote 26:

Chomé in ‘Lettres Edif.’ vol. viii.; see also Martius, vol. i. p. 446.

Footnote 27:

Waitz, vol. ii. p. 419 (Maravi).

Footnote 28:

Callaway, ‘Rel. of Amazulu,’ p. 196, &c.; Arbousset and Daumas, p.

237.

Footnote 29:

J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ pp. 210, 218. See also Brun-Rollet, pp. 200,

234; Meiners, vol. i. p. 211.

Footnote 30:

Steinhauser in ‘Mag. der Evang. Miss.’ Basel, 1856, No. 2, p. 135.

Footnote 31:

Manu, xi. xii. Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. i. p. 164, vol. ii. pp. 215,

347-52.

Footnote 32:

St. John, ‘Far East,’ vol. i. p. 181; Perelaer, ‘Ethnog. Beschr. der

Dajaks,’ p. 17.

Footnote 33:

Hunter, ‘Rural Bengal,’ p. 210. See also Shaw in ‘As. Res.’ vol. iv.

p. 46 (Rajmahal tribes).

Footnote 34:

Abraham Roger, ‘La Porte Ouverte,’ Amst. 1670, p. 107.

Footnote 35:

Manu, xii. 9: ‘çarîrajaih karmmadoshaih yâti sthâvaratâm narah’—‘for

crimes done in the body, the man goes to the inert (motionless)

state;’ xii. 42, ‘sthâvarâh krimakîtâçcha matsyâh sarpâh sakachhapâh

paçavaçcha mrigaschaiva jaghanyâ tâmasî gatih’—‘inert (motionless)

things, worms and insects, fish, serpents, tortoises and beasts and

deer also are the last dark form.’

Footnote 36:

Köppen, ‘Religion des Buddha,’ vol. i. pp. 35, 289, &c., 318;

Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire, ‘Le Bouddha et sa Religion,’ p. 122; Hardy,

‘Manual of Budhism,’ pp. 98, &c., 180, 318, 445, &c.

Footnote 37:

Herod. ii. 123, see Rawlinson’s Tr.; Plutarch. De Iside 31, 72;

Wilkinson, ‘Ancient Eg.’ vol. ii. ch. xvi.

Footnote 38:

Plat. Phædo, Timæus, Phædrus, Repub.; Diog. Laert. Empedokles xii.;

Pindar. Olymp. ii. antistr. 4; Ovid. Metam. xv. 160; Lucian. Somn.

17, &c. Philostr. Vit. Apollon. Tyan. See also Meyer’s

Conversations-Lexicon, art. ‘Seelenwanderung.’ For re-birth in old

Scandinavia, see Helgakvidha, iii., in ‘Edda.’

Footnote 39:

Eisenmenger, part ii. p. 23, &c.

Footnote 40:

Beausobre, ‘Hist. de Manichée,’ &c., vol. i. pp. 245-6, vol. ii. pp.

496-9; G. Flügel, ‘Mani.’ See Augustin. Contra Faust.; De Hæres.; De

Quantitate Animæ.

Footnote 41:

Gul. de Rubruquis in ‘Rec. des Voy. Soc. de Géographie de Paris,’ vol.

iv. p. 356. Benjamin of Tudela, ed. and tr. by Asher, Hebrew 22, Eng.

p. 62. Niebuhr, ‘Reisebeschr. nach Arabien,’ &c., vol. ii. pp.

438-443; Meiners, vol. ii. p. 796.

Footnote 42:

St. Clair and Brophy, ‘Bulgaria,’ p. 57. Compare the tenets of the

Russian sect of Dukhobortzi, in Haxthausen, ‘Russian Empire,’ vol. i.

p. 288, &c.

Footnote 43:

Since the first publication of the above remark, M. Louis Figuier has

supplied a perfect modern instance by his book, entitled ‘Le Lendemain

de la Mort,’ translated into English as ‘The Day after Death: Our

Future Life according to Science.’ His attempt to revive the ancient

belief, and to connect it with the evolution-theory of modern

naturalists, is carried out with more than Buddhist elaborateness.

Body is the habitat of soul, which goes out when a man dies, as one

forsakes a burning house. In the course of development, a soul may

migrate through bodies stage after stage, zoophyte and oyster,

grasshopper and eagle, crocodile and dog, till it arrives at man,

thence ascending to become one of the superhuman beings or angels who

dwell in the planetary ether, and thence to a still higher state, the

secret of whose nature M. Figuier does not endeavour to penetrate,

‘because our means of investigation fail at this point.’ The ultimate

destiny of the more glorified being is the Sun; the pure spirits who

form its mass of burning gases, pour out germs and life to start the

course of planetary existence. (Note to 2nd edition.)

Footnote 44:

Swedenborg, ‘The True Christian Religion,’ 13. Compare the notion

attributed to the followers of Basilides the Gnostic, of men whose

souls are affected by spirits or dispositions as of wolf, ape, lion,

or bear, wherefore their souls bear the properties of these, and

imitate their deeds (Clem. Alex. Stromat. ii. c. 20).

Footnote 45:

See J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrel.’ p. 208 (Caribs); but compare

Rochefort, p. 429. Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 269, Castrén, ‘Finnische

Mythologie,’ p. 119.

Footnote 46:

For Egyptian evidence see the funeral papyri and translations of the

‘Book of the Dead.’ Compare Brinton, ‘Myths of New World,’ p. 254, &c.

Footnote 47:

Aryan evidence in ‘Rig-Veda,’ x. 14, 8; xi. 1, 8; Manu, xii. 16-22;

Max Müller, ‘Todtenbestattung,’ pp. xii. xiv.; ‘Chips,’ vol. i. p. 47;

Muir in ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ vol. i. 1865, p. 306; Spiegel,

‘Avesta’; Haug, ‘Essays on the Parsis.’

Footnote 48:

Origen, De Princip. ii. 3, 2: ‘materiæ corporalis, cujus materiæ anima

usum semper habet, in qualibet qualitate positæ, nunc quidem carnali,

postmodum vero subtiliori et puriori, quæ spiritalis appellatur.’

Footnote 49:

Burton, ‘Central Africa,’ vol. ii. p. 345.

Footnote 50:

Callaway, ‘Rel. of Amazulu,’ p. 84.

Footnote 51:

Kaufmann, ‘Schilderungen aus Centralafrika,’ p. 124; G. Lejean in

‘Rev. des Deux Mondes,’ Apr. 1, 1860, p. 760; see Brun-Rollet, ‘Nil

Blanc,’ pp. 100, 234. A dialogue by the missionary Beltrame (1859-60),

in Mitterutzner, ‘Dinka-Sprache,’ p. 57, ascribes to the Dinkas ideas

of heaven and hell, which, however, show Christian influence.

Footnote 52:

Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. ii. p. 136; John Smith, ‘Descr. of

Virginia,’ 33; Oviedo, ‘Nicaragua,’ p. 50. The reference to the Laos

in Meiners, vol. ii. p. 760, is worthless.

Footnote 53:

Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 259.

Footnote 54:

Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 244. See ‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. iii.

p. 113 (Dayaks). Compare wasting and death of souls in depths of

Hades, Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 232.

Footnote 55:

Bosman, ‘Guinea’ in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 401. See also Waitz,

‘Anthropologie,’ vol. ii. p. 191 (W. Afr.); Callaway, ‘Rel. of

Amazulu,’ p. 355.

Footnote 56:

Cavazzi, ‘Congo, Matamba, et Angola,’ lib. i. p. 270. See also

Liebrecht in ‘Zeitschr. für Ethnologie,’ vol. v. p. 96 (Tartary,

Scandinavia, Greece).

Footnote 57:

Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. p. 310; Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’

pp. 111, 193; Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. p. 235.

Footnote 58:

Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 323.

Footnote 59:

Kolben, p. 579.

Footnote 60:

Billings, p. 125.

Footnote 61:

Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien.’ vol. i. p. 145; Cross, l.c., p. 311. For

other cases of desertion of dwellings after a death, possibly for the

same motive, see Bourien, ‘Tribes of Malay Pen.’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’

vol. iii. p. 82; Polack, ‘M. of New Zealanders,’ vol. i. pp. 204, 216;

Steiler, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 271. But the Todas say that the buffaloes

slaughtered and the hut burnt at the funeral are transferred to the

spirit of the deceased in the next world; Shortt in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’

vol. vii. p. 247. See Waitz, vol. iii. p. 199.

Footnote 62:

Egede, ‘Greenland,’ p. 152; Cranz, p. 300.

Footnote 63:

Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 323; see pp. 329, 363.

Footnote 64:

Bowring, ‘Siam,’ vol. i. p. 122; Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien.’ vol. iii. p.

258.

Footnote 65:

Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 120.

Footnote 66:

Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ pp. 213-17. Other cases of taking out the

dead by a gap made on purpose: Arbousset and Daumas, p. 502 (Bushmen);

Magyar, p. 351 (Kimbunda); Moffat, p. 307 (Bechuanas); Waitz, vol.

iii. p. 199 (Ojibwas);—their motive is probably that the ghost may not

find its way back by the door.

Footnote 67:

Oldfield in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. pp. 228, 236, 245.

Footnote 68:

Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 221; Schirren, p. 91; see Turner,

‘Polynesia,’ p. 233.

Footnote 69:

Morgan, ‘League of Iroquois,’ p. 174.

Footnote 70:

J. G. Müller, p. 286.

Footnote 71:

Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 126.

Footnote 72:

Cross in ‘Journ. Amer. Or. Soc.’ vol. iv. p. 309; Mason in ‘Journ. As.

Soc. Bengal,’ 1865, part ii. p. 203. See also J. Anderson, ‘Exp. to W.

Yunnan,’ pp. 126, 131 (Shans).

Footnote 73:

Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ pp. 51, 99-101.

Footnote 74:

Lucian. De Luctu. See Pauly, ‘Real. Encyclop.’ and Smith, ‘Dic. of Gr.

and Rom. Ant.’ s.v. ‘inferi.’

Footnote 75:

Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ p. 277.

Footnote 76:

Calmet, vol. ii. ch. xxxvi.; Brand, vol. iii. p. 67.

Footnote 77:

Charlevoix, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. vi. p. 75; Schoolcraft, ‘Indian

Tribes,’ part i. pp. 39, 83; part iv. p. 65; Tanner’s ‘Narr.’ p. 293.

Footnote 78:

Brebeuf in ‘Rel. des Jés.’ 1636, p. 104.

Footnote 79:

Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. pp. 253, 364. See Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’

p. 220.

Footnote 80:

Krapf, ‘E. Afr.’ p. 150.

Footnote 81:

T. J. Hutchinson, p. 206.

Footnote 82:

Cavazzi, ‘Congo, &c.’ lib. i. p. 264. So in ancient Greece, Lucian.

Charon, 22.

Footnote 83:

Hodgson, ‘Abor. of India,’ p. 180.

Footnote 84:

‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. ii. p. 235.

Footnote 85:

Tickell in ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ vol. ix. p. 795; Dalton, ibid.

1866, part ii. p. 153, &c.; and in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi. p. 1, &c.;

Latham, ‘Descr. Eth.’ vol. ii. p. 415, &c.

Footnote 86:

Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 62; Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 121.

Footnote 87:

Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. p. 173, &c.; vol. ii. p. 91, &c.;

Meiners, vol. i. p. 306.

Footnote 88:

Wilkinson, ‘Ancient Eg.’ vol. ii. p. 362; Lucian. De Luctu, 21.

Footnote 89:

Manu, iii.; Colebrooke, ‘Essays,’ vol. i. p. 161, &c.; Pictet,

‘Origines Indo-Europ.’ part ii. p. 600; Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. ii. p.

332.

Footnote 90:

Pauly, ‘Real-Encyclop.’ s.v. ‘funus.’; Smith’s ‘Dic.’ s.v. ‘funus.’

See Meiners, vol. i. pp. 305-19.

Footnote 91:

Augustin. contra Faustum, xx. 4; De Civ. Dei, viii. 27; conf. vi. 2.

See Beausobre, vol. ii. pp. 633, 685; Bingham, xx. c. 7.

Footnote 92:

Saint-Foix, ‘Essais Historiques sur Paris,’ in ‘Œuvres,’ vol. iv. p.

147, &c.

Footnote 93:

Lady Herbert, ‘Impressions of Spain,’ p. 8.

Footnote 94:

H. C. Romanoff, ‘Rites and Customs of Greco-Russian Church,’ p. 249;

Ralston, ‘Songs of the Russian People,’ pp. 135, 320; St. Clair and

Brophy, ‘Bulgaria,’ p. 77; Brand, ‘Pop. Ant.’ vol. i. p. 115.

Footnote 95:

Beside the accounts of annual festivals of the dead cited here, see

the following:—Santos, ‘Ethiopia,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 685

(Sept.); Brasseur, ‘Mexique,’ vol. iii. pp. 23, 522, 528 (Aug., Oct.,

Nov.); Rivero and Tschudi, ‘Peru,’ p. 134 (Peruvian feast dated as

Nov. 2 in coincidence with All Souls’, but this reckoning is vitiated

by confusion of seasons of N. and S. hemisphere, see J. G. Müller, p.

389; moreover, the Peruvian feast may have been originally held at a

different date, and transferred, as happened elsewhere, to the

‘Spanish All Souls’); Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. ii. pp. 44, 62 (esp.

Apr.); Caron, ‘Japan,’ in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 629 (Aug.).

Footnote 96:

Mason, ‘Karens,’ l. c. p. 238.

Footnote 97:

Hodgson, ‘Abor. of India,’ p. 147.

Footnote 98:

Munzinger, ‘Ostafr. Stud.’ p. 473.

Footnote 99:

Waitz, vol. ii. p. 194.

Footnote 100:

G. D’Alaux in ‘Rev. des Deux Mondes,’ May 15, 1852, p. 76.

Footnote 101:

Ovid. Fast. ii. 533; v. 420.

Footnote 102:

Spiegel, ‘Avesta,’ vol. ii. p. ci.; Alger, p. 137.

Footnote 103:

Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ pp. 374, 408; St. Clair and Brophy, ‘Bulgaria,’

p. 77; Romanoff, ‘Greco-Roman Church,’ p. 255.

Footnote 104:

Petrus Damianus, ‘Vita S. Odilonis,’ in the Bollandist ‘Acta

Sanctorum,’ Jan. 1, has the quaint legend attached to the new

ordinance. An island hermit dwelt near a volcano, where souls of the

wicked were tormented in the flames. The holy man heard the

officiating demons lament that their daily task of new torture was

interfered with by the prayers and alms of devout persons leagued

against them to save souls, and especially they complained of the

Monks of Cluny. Thereupon the hermit sent a message to Abbot Odilo,

who carried out the work to the efficacy of which he had received such

perfect spiritual testimony, by decreeing that November 2, the day

after All Saints’, should be set apart for services for the departed.

Footnote 105:

Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 336. Meiners, vol. i. p. 316; vol. ii.

p. 290. Wuttke, ‘Deutsche Volksaberglaube,’ p. 216. Cortet, ‘Fêtes

Religieuses,’ p. 233; ‘Westminster Rev.’ Jan. 1860; Hersart de la

Villemarqué, ‘Chants de la Bretagne,’ vol. ii. p. 307.

Footnote 106:

Le Jeune in ‘Rel. des Jés.’ 1634, p. 16; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 195.

Footnote 107:

Cavazzi, ‘Congo,’ &c., book i. 265.

Footnote 108:

Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 865, but not so in the account of the Feast of the

Dead in Boecler, ‘Ehsten Abergl. Gebr.’ (ed. Kreutzwald), p. 89.

Compare Martius, ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol. i. p. 345 (Gês). The following

passage from a spiritualist journal, ‘The Medium,’ Feb. 9, 1872, shows

this primitive notion curiously surviving in modern England. ‘Every

time we sat at dinner, we had not only spirit-voices calling to us,

but spirit-hands touching us; and last evening, as it was his

farewell, they gave us a special manifestation, unasked for and

unlooked for. He sitting at the right hand of me, a vacant chair

opposite to him began moving, and, in answer to whether it would have

some dinner, said “Yes.” I then asked it to select what it would take,

when it chose _croquets des pommes de terre_ (a French way of dressing

potatoes, about three inches long and two wide. I will send you one

that you may see it). I was desired to put this on the chair, either

in a tablespoon or on a plate. I placed it in a tablespoon, thinking

that probably the plate might be broken. In a few seconds I was told

that it was eaten, and looking, found the half of it gone, with the

marks showing the teeth.’ (Note to 2nd ed.)

Footnote 109:

Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 220, see 104.

Footnote 110:

Brasseur, ‘Mexique,’ vol. iii. p. 24.

Footnote 111:

Colebrooke, ‘Essays,’ vol. i. p. 163, &c.; Manu. iii.

Footnote 112:

Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ p. 408; Hartknoch, ‘Preussen,’ part i. p. 187.

Footnote 113:

Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. ii. pp. 33, 48; Meiners, vol. i. p. 318.

Footnote 114:

Borri, ‘Relatione della Nuova Missione della Comp. di Giesu,’ Rome,

1631, p. 208; and in Pinkerton, vol. ix. p. 822, &c.

Footnote 115:

Grout, ‘Zulu Land,’ p. 140; see Callaway, ‘Rel. of Amazulu,’ p. 11.

Footnote 116:

Caron, ‘Japan,’ vol. vii. p. 629; see Turpin, ‘Siam,’ ibid. vol. ix.

p. 590.

Footnote 117:

Ovid. Fast. ii. 533.

Footnote 118:

Legge, ‘Confucius,’ pp. 101-2, 130; Bunsen, ‘God in History,’ p. 271.

Footnote 119:

Brand, ‘Pop. Ant.’ vol. i. p. 392, vol. ii. p. 289.