CHAPTER XIII._Primitive culture, vol. 2 (of 2)

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.

The departure of the dead man’s soul from the world of living men, its

journey to the distant land of spirits, the life it will lead in its new

home, are topics on which the lower races for the most part hold

explicit doctrines. When these fall under the inspection of a modern

ethnographer, he treats them as myths; often to a high degree

intelligible and rational in their origin, consistent and regular in

their structure, but not the less myths. Few subjects have aroused the

savage poet’s mind to such bold and vivid imagery as the thought of the

hereafter. Yet also a survey of its details among mankind displays in

the midst of variety a regular recurrence of episode which brings the

ever-recurring question, how far is this correspondence due to

transmission of the same thought from tribe to tribe, and how far to

similar but independent development in distant lands?

From the savage state up into the midst of civilization, the comparison

may be carried through. Low races and high, in region after region, can

point out the very spot whence the flitting souls start to travel toward

their new home. At the extreme western cape of Vanua Levu, a calm and

solemn place of cliff and forest, the souls of the Fijian dead embark

for the judgement-seat of Ndengei, and thither the living come in

pilgrimage, thinking to see their ghosts and gods.[120] The Baperi of

South Africa will venture to creep a little way into their cavern of

Marimatlé, whence men and animals came forth into the world, and whither

souls return at death.[121] In Mexico the cavern of Chalchatongo led to

the plains of paradise, and the Aztec name of Mictlan, ‘Land of the

Dead,’ now Mitla, keeps up the remembrance of another subterranean

temple which opened the way to the sojourn of the blessed.[122] How

naturally a dreary place, fit rather for the dead than the living,

suggests the thought of an entrance to the land of the departed, is seen

in the fictitious travels known under the name of Sir John Mandevill,

where the description of the Vale Perilous, adapted from the terrible

valley which Friar Odoric had seen full of corpses and heard resound

with strange noise of drums, has this appropriate ending: ‘This vale es

full of deuilles and all way has bene; and men saise in that cuntree

that thare es ane entree to hell.’[123] In more genuine folklore, North

German peasants still remember on the banks of the swampy Drömling the

place of access to the land of departed souls.[124] To us Englishmen the

shores of lake Avernus, trodden daily by our tourists, are more familiar

than the Irish analogue of the place, Lough Derg, with its cavern

entrance of St. Patrick’s Purgatory leading down to the awful world

below. The mass of mystic details need not be repeated here of the

soul’s dread journey by caverns and rocky paths and weary plains, over

steep and slippery mountains, by frail bark or giddy bridge across gulfs

or rushing rivers, abiding the fierce onset of the soul-destroyer or the

doom of the stern guardian of the other world. But before describing the

spirit-world which is the end of the soul’s journey, let us see what the

proof is which sustains the belief in both. The lower races claim to

hold their doctrines of the future life on strong tradition, direct

revelation, and even personal experience. To them the land of souls is a

discovered country, from whose bourne many a traveller returns.

Among the legendary visits to the world beyond the grave, there are some

that seem pure myth, without a touch of real personal history. Ojibwa,

the eponymic hero of his North American tribe, as one of his many

exploits descended to the subterranean world of departed spirits, and

came up again to earth.[125] When the Kamchadals were asked how they

knew so well what happens to men after death, they could answer with

their legend of Haetsh the first man. He died and went down into the

world below, and a long while after came up again to his former

dwelling, and there, standing above by the smoke-hole, he talked down to

his kindred in the house and told them about the life to come; it was

then that his two daughters whom he had left below followed him in anger

and smote him so that he died a second time, and now he is chief in the

lower world, and receives the Italmen when they die and rise anew.[126]

Thus, again, in the great Finnish epic, the Kalewala, one great episode

is Wainamoinen’s visit to the land of the dead. Seeking the last

charm-words to build his boat, the hero travelled with quick steps week

after week through bush and wood till he came to the Tuonela river, and

saw before him the island of Tuoni the god of death. Loudly he called to

Tuoni’s daughter to bring the ferry-boat across:—

‘She, the virgin of Manala,

She, the washer of the clothing,

She, the wringer of the linen,

By the river of Tuonela,

In the under-world Manala,

Spake in words, and this their meaning,

This their answer to the hearer:—

“Forth the boat shall come from hither,

When the reason thou hast given

That hath brought thee to Manala,

Neither slain by any sickness,

Nor by Death dragged from the living,

Nor destroyed by other ending.”’

Wainamoinen replies with lying reasons. Iron brought him, he says, but

Tuoni’s daughter answers that no blood drips from his garment; Fire

brought him, he says, but she answers that his locks are unsinged, and

at last he tells his real mission. Then she ferries him over, and

Tuonetar the hostess brings him beer in the two-eared jug, but

Wainamoinen can see the frogs and worms within and will not drink, for

it was not to drain Manala’s beer-jug he had come. He lay in the bed of

Tuoni, and meanwhile they spread the hundred nets of iron and copper

across the river that he might not escape; but he turned into a reed in

the swamp, and as a snake crept through the meshes:—

‘Tuoni’s son with hooked fingers

Iron-pointed hooked fingers

Went to draw his nets at morning—

Salmon-trout he found a hundred,

Thousands of the little fishes,

But he found no Wainamoinen,

Not the old friend of the billows.

Then the ancient Wainamoinen,

Come from out of Tuoni’s kingdom,

Spake in words, and this their meaning,

This their answer to the hearer:—

“Never mayst thou, God of goodness,

Never suffer such another

Who of self-will goes to Mana,

Thrusts his way to Tuoni’s kingdom.

Many they who travel thither,

Few who thence have found the home-way,

From the houses of Tuoni

From the dwellings of Manala.”’[127]

It is enough to name the familiar classic analogues of these mythic

visits to Hades,—the descent of Dionysos to bring back Semele, of

Orpheus to bring back his beloved Eurydike, of Herakles to fetch up the

three-headed Kerberos at the command of his master Eurystheus; above

all, the voyage of Odysseus to the ends of the deep-flowing Ocean, to

the clouded city of Kimmerian men, where shining Helios looks not down

with his rays, and deadly night stretches always over wretched

mortals,—thence they passed along the banks to the entrance of the land

where the shades of the departed, quickened for a while by the taste of

sacrificial blood, talked with the hero and showed him the regions of

their dismal home.[128]

The scene of the descent into Hades is in very deed enacted day by day

before our eyes, as it was before the eyes of the ancient myth-maker,

who watched the sun descend to the dark under-world, and return at dawn

to the land of living men. These heroic legends lie in close-knit

connexion with episodes of solar myth. It is by the simplest poetic

adaptation of the Sun’s daily life, typifying Man’s life in dawning

beauty, in mid-day glory, in evening death, that mythic fancy even fixed

the belief in the religions of the world, that the Land of Departed

Souls lies in the Far West or the World Below. How deeply the myth of

the Sunset has entered into the doctrine of men concerning a Future

State, how the West and the Under-World have become by mere imaginative

analogy Regions of the Dead, how the quaint day-dreams of savage poets

may pass into honoured dogmas of classic sages and modern divines,—all

this the crowd of details here cited from the wide range of culture

stand to prove.

Moreover, visits from or to the dead are matters of personal experience

and personal testimony. When in dream or vision the seer beholds the

spirits of the departed, they give him tidings from the other world, or

he may even rise and travel thither himself, and return to tell the

living what he has seen among the dead. It is sometimes as if the

traveller’s material body went to visit a distant land, and sometimes

all we are told is that the man’s self went, but whether in body or in

spirit is a mere detail of which the story keeps no record. Mostly,

however, it is the seer’s soul which goes forth, leaving his body behind

in ecstasy, sleep, coma, or death. Some of these stories, as we trace

them on from savage into civilized times, are no doubt given in good

faith by the visionary himself, while others are imitations of these

genuine accounts.[129] Now such visions are naturally apt to reproduce

the thoughts with which the seer’s mind was already furnished. Every

idea once lodged in the mind of a savage, a barbarian, or an enthusiast,

is ready thus to be brought back to him from without. It is a vicious

circle; what he believes he therefore sees, and what he sees he

therefore believes. Beholding the reflexion of his own mind like a child

looking at itself in a glass, he humbly receives the teaching of his

second self. The Red Indian visits his happy hunting-grounds, the Tongan

his shadowy island of Bolotu, the Greek enters Hades and looks on the

Elysian Fields, the Christian beholds the heights of Heaven and the

depths of Hell.

Among the North American Indians, and especially the Algonquin tribes,

accounts are not unusual of men whose spirits, travelling in dreams or

in the hallucinations of extreme illness to the land of the dead, have

returned to reanimate their bodies, and tell what they have seen. Their

experiences have been in great measure what they were taught in early

childhood to expect, the journey along the path of the dead, the

monstrous strawberry at which the jebi-ug or ghosts refresh themselves,

but which turns to red rock at the touch of their spoons, the bark

offered them for dried meat and great puff-balls for squashes, the river

of the dead with its snake-bridge or swinging log, the great dog

standing on the other side, the villages of the dead beyond.[130] The

Zulus of our own day tell of men who have gone down by holes in the

ground into the underworld, where mountains and rivers and all things

are as here above, and where a man may find his kindred, for the dead

live in their villages, and may be seen milking their cattle, which are

the cattle killed on earth and come to life anew. The Zulu Umpengula,

who told one of these stories to Dr. Callaway, remembered when he was a

boy seeing an ugly little hairy man called Uncama, who once, chasing a

porcupine that ate his mealies, followed it down a hole in the ground

into the land of the dead. When he came back to his home on earth he

found that he had been given up for dead himself, his wife had duly

burnt and buried his mats and blankets and vessels, and the wondering

people at sight of him again shouted the funeral dirge. Of this Zulu

Dante it used to be continually said, ‘There is the man who went to the

underground people.’[131] One of the most characteristic of these savage

narratives is from New Zealand. This story, which has an especial

interest from the reminiscence it contains of the gigantic extinct Moa,

and which may be repeated at some length as an illustration of the

minute detail and lifelike reality which such visionary legends assume

in barbaric life, was told to Mr. Shortland by a servant of his named Te

Wharewera. An aunt of this man died in a solitary hut near the banks of

Lake Rotorua. Being a lady of rank she was left in her hut, the door and

windows were made fast, and the dwelling was abandoned, as her death had

made it tapu. But a day or two after, Te Wharewera with some others

paddling in a canoe near the place at early morning saw a figure on the

shore beckoning to them. It was the aunt come to life again, but weak

and cold and famished. When sufficiently restored by their timely help,

she told her story. Leaving her body, her spirit had taken flight toward

the North Cape, and arrived at the entrance of Reigna. There, holding on

by the stem of the creeping akeake-plant, she descended the precipice,

and found herself on the sandy beach of a river. Looking round, she

espied in the distance an enormous bird, taller than a man, coming

towards her with rapid strides. This terrible object so frightened her,

that her first thought was to try to return up the steep cliff; but

seeing an old man paddling a small canoe towards her she ran to meet

him, and so escaped the bird. When she had been safely ferried across

she asked the old Charon, mentioning the name of her family, where the

spirits of her kindred dwelt. Following the path the old man pointed

out, she was surprised to find it just such a path as she had been used

to on earth; the aspect of the country, the trees, shrubs, and plants

were all familiar to her. She reached the village and among the crowd

assembled there she found her father and many near relations; they

saluted her, and welcomed her with the wailing chant which Maoris always

address to people met after long absence. But when her father had asked

about his living relatives, and especially about her own child, he told

her she must go back to earth, for no one was left to take care of his

grandchild. By his orders she refused to touch the food that the dead

people offered her, and in spite of their efforts to detain her, her

father got her safely into the canoe, crossed with her, and parting gave

her from under his cloak two enormous sweet potatoes to plant at home

for his grandchild’s especial eating. But as she began to climb the

precipice again, two pursuing infant spirits pulled her back, and she

only escaped by flinging the roots at them, which they stopped to eat,

while she scaled the rock by help of the akeake-stem, till she reached

the earth and flew back to where she had left her body. On returning to

life she found herself in darkness, and what had passed seemed as a

dream, till she perceived that she was deserted and the door fast, and

concluded that she had really died and come to life again. When morning

dawned, a faint light entered by the crevices of the shut-up house, and

she saw on the floor near her a calabash partly full of red ochre mixed

with water; this she eagerly drained to the dregs, and then feeling a

little stronger, succeeded in opening the door and crawling down to the

beach, where her friends soon after found her. Those who listened to her

tale firmly believed the reality of her adventures, but it was much

regretted that she had not brought back at least one of the huge

sweet-potatoes, as evidence of her visit to the land of spirits.[132]

Races of North Asia[133] and West Africa[134] have in like manner their

explorers of the world beyond the grave.

Classic literature continues the series. Lucian’s graphic tales

represent the belief of their age, if not of their author. His Eukrates

looks down the chasm into Hades, and sees the dead reclining on the

asphodel in companies of kinsfolk and friends; among them he recognizes

Sokrates with his bald head and pot-belly, and also his own father,

dressed in the clothes he was buried in. Then Kleodemos caps this story

with his own, how when he was sick, on the seventh day when his fever

was burning like a furnace, every one left him, and the doors were shut.

Then there stood before him an all-beauteous youth in a white garment,

who led him through a chasm into Hades, as he knew by seeing Tantalos

and Tityos and Sisyphos; and bringing him to the court of judgement,

where were Aiakos and the Fates and the Erinyes, the youth set him

before Pluto the King, who sat reading the names of those whose day of

life was over. But Pluto was angry, and said to the guide, ‘This one’s

thread is not run out, that he should depart, but bring me Demylos the

coppersmith, for he is living beyond the spindle.’ So Kleodemos came

back to himself free from his fever and announced that Demylos, who was

a sick neighbour, would die; and accordingly a little while after there

was heard the cry of the mourners wailing for him.[135] Plutarch’s

stories, told more seriously, are yet one in type with the mocking

Lucian’s. The wicked, pleasure-seeking Thespesios lies three days as

dead, and revives to tell his vision of the world below. One Antyllos

was sick, and seemed to the doctors to retain no trace of life; till,

waking without sign of insanity, he declared that he had been indeed

dead, but was ordered back to life, those who brought him being severely

chidden by their lord, and sent to fetch Nikander instead, a well-known

currier, who was accordingly taken with a fever, and died on the third

day.[136] Such stories, old and new, are current among the Hindus at

this day. A certain man’s soul, for instance, is carried to the realm of

Yama by mistake for a namesake, and is sent back in haste to regain his

body before it is burnt; but in the meanwhile he has a glimpse of the

hideous punishments of the wicked, and of the glorious life of those who

had mortified the flesh on earth, and of suttee-widows now sitting in

happiness by their husbands.[137] Mutatis mutandis these tales reappear

in Christian mythology, as when Gregory the Great records that a certain

nobleman named Stephen died, who was taken to the region of Hades, and

saw many things he had heard before but not believed; but when he was

set before the ruler there presiding, he sent him back, saying that it

was this Stephen’s neighbour—Stephen the smith—whom he had commanded to

be brought; and accordingly the one returned to life, and the other

died.[138]

The thought of human visitors revealing the mysteries of the world

beyond the grave, which indeed took no slight hold on Christian belief,

attached itself in a remarkable way to the doctrine of Christ’s descent

into Hades. This dogma had so strongly established itself by the end of

the 4th century, that Augustine could ask, ‘Quis nisi infidelis

negaverit fuisse apud inferos Christum?’[139] A distinct statement of

the dogma was afterwards introduced into the symbol commonly called the

‘Apostles’ Creed:’ ‘Descendit ad inferos,’ ‘Descendit ad inferna,’ ‘He

descended into hell.’[140] The Descent into Hades, which had the

theological use of providing a theory of salvation applicable to the

saints of the old covenant, imprisoned in the limbo of the fathers, is

narrated in full in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, and is made

there to rest upon a legend which belongs to the present group of human

visits to the other world. It is related that two sons of Simeon, named

Charinus and Leucius, rose from their tombs at the Resurrection, and

went about silently and prayerfully among men, till Annas and Caiaphas

brought them into the synagogue, and charged them to tell of their

raising from the dead. Then, making the sign of the cross upon their

tongues, the two asked for parchment and wrote their record. They had

been set with all their fathers in the depths of Hades, when on a sudden

there appeared the colour of the sun like gold, and a purple royal light

shining on them; then the patriarchs and prophets, from Adam to Simeon

and John the Baptist, rejoicing proclaimed the coming of the light and

the fulfilment of the prophecies; Satan and Hades wrangled in strife

together; in vain the brazen gates were shut with their iron bars, for

the summons came to open the gates that the king of glory may come in,

who hath broken the gates of brass and cut the bars of iron in sunder;

then the mighty Lord broke the fetters and visited them who sat in

darkness and the shadow of death; Adam and his righteous children were

delivered from Hades, and led into the glorious grace of Paradise.[141]

Dante, elaborating in the ‘Divina Commedia’ the conceptions of paradise,

purgatory, and hell familiar to the actual belief of his age, describes

them once more in the guise of a living visitor to the land of the dead.

Echoes in mediæval legend of such exploring expeditions to the world

below still linger faintly in the popular belief of Europe. It has been

thus with St. Patrick’s Purgatory,[142] the cavern in the island of

Lough Derg, in the county Donegal, which even in the seventeenth century

O’Sullevan could describe first and foremost in his ‘Catholic History’

as ‘the greatest of all memorable things of Ireland.’ Mediæval visits to

the other world were often made in the spirit. But like Ulysses,

Wainamoinen, and Dante, men could here make the journey in body, as did

Sir Owain and the monk Gilbert. When the pilgrim had spent fifteen days

in prayer and fasting in the church, and had been led with litanies and

sprinkling of holy water to the entrance of the purgatory, and the last

warnings of the monks had failed to turn him from his venture, the door

was closed upon him, and if found next morning, he could tell the events

of his awful journey—how he crossed the narrow bridge that spans the

river of death, how he saw the hideous torments of hell, and approached

the joys of paradise. Sir Owain, one of King Stephen’s knights, went

thither in penance for his life of violence and rapine, and this was one

of the scenes he beheld in purgatory:—

‘There come develes other mony mo,

And badde the knygth with hem to go,

And ladde him into a fowle contreye,

Where ever was nygth and never day,

For hit was derke and wonther colde:

Yette was there never man so bolde,

Hadde he never so mony clothes on,

But he wolde be colde as ony stone.

Wynde herde he none blowe,

But faste hit frese bothe hye and lowe.

They browgte him to a felde full brode,

Overe suche another never he yode,

For of the lengthe none ende he knewe

Thereover algate he moste nowe.

As he wente he herde a crye,

He wondered what hit was, and why,

He syg ther men and wymmen also

That lowde cryed, for hem was woo.

They leyen thykke on every londe,

Faste nayled bothe fote and honde

With nayles glowyng alle of brasse:

They ete the erthe so wo hem was;

Here face was nayled to the grownde.

“Spare,” they cryde, “a lytylle stounde.”

The develes wolde hem not spare:

To hem peyne they thowgte yare.’

When Owain had seen the other fields of punishment, with their fiery

serpents and toads, and the fires where sinners were hung up by their

offending members, and roasted on spits, and basted with molten metal,

and turned about on a great wheel of fire, and when he had passed the

Devil’s Mouth over the awful bridge, he reached the fair white glassy

wall of the Earthly Paradise, reaching upward and upward, and saw before

him the beautiful gate, whence issued a ravishing perfume. Then he soon

forgot his pains and sorrows.

‘As he stode, and was so fayne,

Hym thowgth ther come hym agayne

A swyde fayr processyoun

Of alle manere menne of relygyoun,

Fayre vestementes they hadde on,

So ryche syg he never none.

Myche joye hym thowgte to se

Bysshopes yn here dygnité;

Ilkone wente other be and be,

Every man yn his degré.

He syg ther monkes and chanones,

And freres with newe shavene crownes;

Ermytes he saw there amonge,

And nonnes with fulle mery songe;

Persones, prestes, and vycaryes;

They made fulle mery melodyes.

He syg ther kynges and emperoures,

And dukes that had casteles and toures,

Erles and barones fele,

That some tyme hadde the worldes wele.

Other folke he syg also,

Never so mony as he dede thoo.

Wymmen he syg ther that tyde:

Myche was the joye ther on every syde:

For alle was joye that with hem ferde,

And myche solempnyté he herde.’

The procession welcomed Owain, and led him about, showing him the

beauties of that country:—

‘Hyt was grene, and fulle of flowres

Of mony dyvers colowres;

Hyt was grene on every syde,

As medewus are yn someres tyde.

Ther were trees growyng fulle grene

Fulle of fruyte ever more, y wene;

For ther was frwyte of mony a kynde,

Such yn the londe may no mon fynde.

Ther they have the tree of lyfe,

Theryn ys myrthe, and never stryfe;

Frwyte of wysdom also ther ys,

Of the whyche Adam and Eve dede amysse:

Other manere frwytes ther were fele,

And alle manere joye and wele.

Moche folke he syg ther dwelle,

There was no tongue that mygth hem telle;

Alle were they cloded yn ryche wede,

What cloth hit was he kowthe not rede.

There was no wronge, but ever rygth,

Ever day and nevere nygth.

They shone as brygth and more clere

Than ony sonne yn the day doth here.’

The poem, in fifteenth-century English, from which these passages are

taken, is a version of the original legend of earlier date, and as such

contrasts with a story really dating from early in the fifteenth

century—William Staunton’s descent into Purgatory, where the themes of

the old sincerely-believed visionary lore are fading into moral

allegory, and the traveller sees the gay gold and silver collars and

girdles burning into the wearer’s flesh, and the jags that men were

clothed in now become adders and dragons, sucking and stinging them, and

the fiends drawing down the skin of women’s shoulders into pokes, and

smiting into their heads with burning hammers their gay chaplets of gold

and jewels turned to burning nails, and so forth. Late in this fifteenth

century, St. Patrick’s Purgatory fell into discredit, but even the

destruction of the entrance-building, in 1479, by Papal order, did not

destroy the ideal road. About 1693, an excavation on the spot brought to

light a window with iron stanchions; there was a cry for holy water to

keep the spirits from breaking out from prison, and the priest smelt

brimstone from the dark cavity below, which, however, unfortunately

turned out to be a cellar. In still later times, the yearly pilgrimage

of tens of thousands of votaries to the holy place has kept up this

interesting survival from the lower culture, whereby a communication may

still be traced, if not from Earth to Hades, at least from the belief of

the New Zealander to that of the Irish peasant.

To study and compare the ideal regions where man has placed the abodes

of departed souls is not an unprofitable task. True, geography has now

mapped out into mere earth and water the space that lay beyond the

narrower sea and land known to the older nations, and astronomy no

longer recognizes the flat earth trodden by men as being the roof of

subterranean halls, nor the sky as being a solid firmament, shutting out

men’s gaze from strata or spheres of empyræan regions beyond. Yet if we

carry our minds back to the state of knowledge among the lower races, we

shall not find it hard to understand the early conceptions as to the

locality of the regions beyond the grave. They are no secrets of high

knowledge made known to sages of old; they are the natural fancies which

childlike ignorance would frame in any age. The regularity with which

such conceptions repeat themselves over the world bears testimony to the

regularity of the processes by which opinion is formed among mankind. At

the same time, the student who carefully compares them will find in them

a perfect illustration of an important principle, widely applicable to

the general theory of the formation of human opinion. When a problem has

presented itself to mankind at large, susceptible of a number of

solutions about equally plausible, the result is that the several

opinions thus produced will be found lying scattered in country after

country. The problem here is, given the existence of souls of the dead

who from time to time visit the living, where is the home of these

ghosts? Why men in one district should have preferred the earth, in

another the under-world, in another the sky, as the abode of departed

souls, is a question often difficult to answer. But we may at least see

how again and again the question was taken in hand, and how out of the

three or four available answers some peoples adopted one, some another,

some several at once. Primitive theologians had all the world before

them where to choose their place of rest for the departed, and they used

to the full their speculative liberty.

Firstly, when the land of souls is located on the surface of the earth,

there is choice of fit places among wild and cloudy precipices, in

secluded valleys, in far-off plains and islands. In Borneo, Mr. St. John

visited the heaven of the Idaan race, on the summit of Kina Balu, and

the native guides, who feared to pass the night in this abode of

spirits, showed the traveller the moss on which the souls of their

ancestors fed, and the footprints of the ghostly buffaloes that followed

them. On Gunung Danka, a mountain in West Java, there is such another

‘Earthly Paradise.’ The Sajira who dwell in the district indeed profess

themselves Mohammedans, but they secretly maintain their old belief, and

at death or funeral they enjoin the soul in solemn form to set aside the

Moslem Allah, and to take the way to the dwelling-place of his own

forefathers’ souls:—

‘Step up the bed of the river, and cross the neck of land,

Where the aren trees stand in a clump, and the pinangs in a row,

Thither direct thy steps, Laillah being set aside.’

Mr. Jonathan Rigg had lived ten years among these people, and knew them

well, yet had never found out that their paradise was on this mountain.

When at last he heard of it, he made the ascent, finding on the top only

a few river-stones, forming one of the balai, or sacred cairns, common

in the district. But the popular belief, that a tiger would devour the

chiefs who permitted a violation of the sacred place, soon received the

sort of confirmation which such beliefs receive everywhere, for a tiger

killed two children a few days later, and the disaster was of course

ascribed to Mr. Rigg’s profanation.[143] The Chilians said that the soul

goes westward over the sea to Gulcheman, the dwelling-place of the dead

beyond the mountains; life, some said, was all pleasure there, but

others thought that part would be happy and part miserable.[144] Hidden

among the mountains of Mexico lay the joyous garden-land of Tlalocan,

where maize, and pumpkins, and chilis, and tomatos never failed, and

where abode the souls of children sacrificed to Tlaloc, its god, and the

souls of such as died by drowning or thunderstroke, or by leprosy or

dropsy, or other acute disease.[145] A survival of such thought may be

traced into mediæval civilization, in the legends of the Earthly

Paradise, the fire-girt abode of saints not yet raised to highest bliss,

localized in the utmost East of Asia, where earth stretches up towards

heaven.[146] When Columbus sailed west-ward across the Atlantic to seek

‘the new heaven and the new earth’ he had read of in Isaiah, he found

them, though not as he sought. It is a quaint coincidence that he found

there also, though not as he sought it, the Earthly Paradise which was

another main object of his venturous quest. The Haitians described to

the white men their Coaibai, the paradise of the dead, in the lovely

Western valleys of their island, where the souls hidden by day among the

cliffs came down at night to feed on the delicious fruit of the

mamey-trees, of which the living ate but sparingly, lest the souls of

their friends should want.[147]

Secondly, there are Australians who think that the spirit of the dead

hovers awhile on earth and goes at last toward the setting sun, or

westward over the sea to the island of souls, the home of his fathers.

Thus these rudest savages have developed two thoughts which we meet with

again and again far onward in the course of culture—the thought of an

island of the dead, and the thought that the world of departed souls is

in the West, whither the Sun descends at evening to his daily

death.[148] Among the North American Indians, when once upon a time an

Algonquin hunter left his body behind and visited the land of souls in

the sunny south, he saw before him beautiful trees and plants, but found

he could walk right through them. Then he paddled in the canoe of white

shining stone across the lake where wicked souls perish in the storm,

till he reached the beautiful and happy island where there is no cold,

no war, no bloodshed, but the creatures run happily about, nourished by

the air they breathe.[149] Tongan legend says that, long ago, a canoe

returning from Fiji was driven by stress of weather to Bolotu, the

island of gods and souls lying in the ocean north-west of Tonga. That

island is larger than all theirs together, full of all finest fruits and

loveliest flowers, that fill the air with fragrance, and come anew the

moment they are plucked; birds of beauteous plumage are there, and hogs

in plenty, all immortal save when killed for the gods to eat, and then

new living ones appear immediately to fill their places. But when the

hungry crew of the canoe landed, they tried in vain to pluck the shadowy

bread-fruit, they walked through unresisting trees and houses, even as

the souls of chiefs who met them walked unchecked through their solid

bodies. Counselled to hasten home from this land of no earthly food, the

men sailed to Tonga, but the deadly air of Bolotu had infected them, and

they soon all died.[150]

Such ideas took strong hold on classic thought, in the belief in a

paradise in the Fortunate Islands of the far Western Ocean. Hesiod in

the ‘Works and Days’ tells of the half-gods of the Fourth Age, between

the Age of Bronze and the Age of Iron. When death closed on this heroic

race, Zeus granted them at the ends of Earth a life and home, apart from

man and far from the immortals. There Kronos reigns over them, and they

dwell careless in the Islands of the Happy, beside deep-eddying

Ocean—blest heroes, for whom the grain-giving field bears, thrice

blooming yearly, the honey-sweet fruit:—

‘Ἔνθ’ ἤτοι τοὺς μὲν θανάτου τέλος ἀμφεκάλυψε·

Τοîς δὲ δίχ’ ἀνθρώπον βίοτον καὶ ἤθἐ ὀπάσσας

Ζεὺς Κρονίδες κατένασσε πατήρ ἐς πείρατα γαίες,

Τηλοὐ ἀπ’ ἀθανάτον· τοῖσιν Κρόνος ἐμβασιλεύει·

Καὶ τοὶ μὲν ναίουσιν ἀκηδέα θυμὸν ἔχοντες

Ἐν μακάρον νήσοισι παρ’ Ὠκεανὸν βαθυδίνεν,

Ὄλβιοι ἤροες, τοῖσιν μελιεδέα καρπὸν

Τρὶς ἔτεος θάλλοντα φέρει ζείδωρος ἄρουρα.’[151]

These Islands of the Blest, assigned as the abode of blessed spirits of

the dead, came indeed to be identified with the Elysian Fields. Thus

Pindar sings of steadfast souls, who through three lives on either side

have endured free from injustice; then they pass by the road of Zeus to

the tower of Kronos, where the ocean breezes blow round the islands of

the happy, blazing with golden flowers of land and water. Thus, also, in

the famous hymn of Kallistratos in honour of Harmodios and Aristogeiton,

who slew the tyrant Hipparchos:—

‘Φίλταθ’ Ἁρμόδἰ, οὔ τι πω τέθνηκας

Νήσοις δ’ ἐν μακάρων σε φασὶν εîναι,

Ἵνα περ ποδώκες Ἀχιλλεύς,

Τυδείδεν τε φασὶ τὸν ἐσθλὸν Διομήδεα.’[152]

This group of legends has especial interest to us Englishmen, who

ourselves dwell, it seems, on such an island of the dead. It is not that

we or our country are of a more ghostly nature than others, but the idea

is geographical we are dwellers in the region of the setting sun, the

land of death. The elaborate account by Procopius, the historian of the

Gothic War, dates from the 6th century. The island of Brittia, according

to him, lies opposite the mouths of the Rhine, some 200 stadia off,

between Britannia and Thule, and on it dwell three populous nations, the

Angles, Frisians, and Britons. (By Brittia, it appears, he means our

Great Britain, his Britannia being the coast-land from modern Brittany

to Holland, and his Thule being Scandinavia.) In the course of his

history it seems to him needful to record a story, mythic and dreamlike

as he thinks, yet which numberless men vouch for as having been

themselves witnesses by eye and ear to its facts. This story is that the

souls of the departed are conveyed across the sea to the island of

Brittia. Along the mainland coast are many villages, inhabited by

fishermen and tillers of the soil and traders to this island in their

vessels. They are subject to the Franks, but pay no tribute, having from

of old had to do by turns the burdensome service of transporting the

souls. Those on duty for each night stay at home till they hear a

knocking at the doors, and a voice of one unseen calling them to their

work. Then without delay rising from their beds, compelled by some

unknown power they go down to the beach, and there they see boats, not

their own but others, lying ready but empty of men. Going on board and

taking the oars, they find that by the burden of the multitude of souls

embarked, the vessel lies low in the water, gunwale under within a

finger’s breadth. In an hour they are at the opposite shore, though in

their own boats they would hardly make the voyage in a night and day.

When they reach the island, the vessel becomes empty, till it is so

light that only the keel touches the waves. They see no man on the

voyage, no man at the landing, but a voice is heard that proclaims the

name and rank and parentage of each newly arrived passenger, or if

women, those of their husbands. Traces of this remarkable legend seem to

have survived, thirteen centuries later, in that endmost district of the

Britannia of Procopius which still keeps the name of Bretagne. Near Raz,

where the narrow promontory stretches westward into the ocean, is the

‘Bay of Souls’ (boé ann anavo); in the commune of Plouguel the corpse is

taken to the churchyard, not by the shorter road by land, but in a boat

by the ‘Passage de l’Enfer,’ across a little arm of the sea; and Breton

folk-lore holds fast to the legend of the Curé de Braspar, whose dog

leads over to Great Britain the souls of the departed, when the wheels

of the soul-car are heard creaking in the air. These are but mutilated

fragments, but they seem to piece together with another Keltic myth,

told by Macpherson in the last century, the voyage of the boat of heroes

to Flath-Innis, Noble Island, the green island home of the departed,

which lies calm amid the storms far in the Western Ocean. With full

reason, also, Mr. Wright traces to the situation of Ireland in the

extreme West its especial association with legends of descents to the

land of shades. Claudian placed at the extremity of Gaul the entrance

where Ulysses found a way to Hades—

‘Est locus extremum qua pandit Gallia litus,

Oceani prætentus aquis, ubi fertur Ulysses,’ &c.

No wonder that this spot should have been since identified with St.

Patrick’s Purgatory, and that some ingenious etymologist should have

found in the name of ‘Ulster’ a corruption of ‘Ulyssisterra,’ and a

commemoration of the hero’s visit.[153]

Thirdly, the belief in a subterranean Hades peopled by the ghosts of the

dead is quite common among the lower races. The earth is flat, say the

Italmen of Kamchatka, for if it were round, people would fall off; it is

the wrong side of another heaven, which covers another earth below,

whither the dead will go down to their new life, and so, as Steller

says, their mundane system is like a tub with three bottoms.[154] In

North America, the Tacullis held that the soul goes after death into the

bowels of the earth, whence it can come back in human shape to visit

friends.[155] In South America, Brazilian souls travel down to the world

below in the West, and Patagonian souls will depart to enjoy eternal

drunkenness in the caves of their ancestral deities.[156] The New

Zealander who says ‘The sun has returned to Hades’ (kua hoki mai te Ra

ki te Rua), simply means that it has set. When a Samoan Islander dies,

the host of spirits that surround the house, waiting to convey his soul

away, set out with him crossing the land and swimming the sea, to the

entrance of the spirit-world. This is at the westernmost point of the

westernmost island, Savaii, and there one may see the two circular holes

or basins where souls descend, chiefs by the bigger and plebeians by the

smaller, into the regions of the under-world. There below is a heaven,

earth, and sea, and people with real bodies, planting, fishing, cooking,

as in the present life; but at night their bodies become like a confused

collection of fiery sparks, and in this state during the hours of

darkness they come up to revisit their former abodes, retiring at dawn

to the bush or to the lower regions.[157] For the state of thought on

this subject among rude African tribes, it is enough to cite the Zulus,

who at death will descend to live in Hades among their ancestors, the

‘Abapansi,’ the ‘people underground.’[158] Among rude Asiatic tribes,

such an example may be taken from the Karens. They are not quite agreed

where Plu, the land of the dead, is situate; it may be above the earth

or beyond the horizon. But the dominant and seemingly indigenous opinion

is that it is below the earth. When the sun sets on earth, it rises in

the Karen Hades, and when it sets in Hades it rises in this world. Here,

again, the familiar belief of the European peasant is found; the spirits

of the dead may come up from the land of shades by night, but at

daybreak must return.[159]

Such ideas, developed by uncultured races, may be followed up in various

detail, through the stage of religion represented by the Mexican and

Peruvian nations,[160] into higher ranges of culture. The Roman Orcus

was in the bowels of the earth, and when the ‘lapis manalis,’ the stone

that closed the mouth of the world below, was moved away on certain

solemn days, the ghosts of the dead came up to the world above, and

partook of the offerings of their friends.[161] Among the Greeks, the

Land of Hades was in the world below, nor was the thought unknown that

it was the sunset realm of the Western god (πρὸς ἑσπέρου θεοῦ). What

Hades seemed like to the popular mind, Lucian thus describes:—‘The great

crowd, indeed, whom the wise call “idiots,” believing Homer and Hesiod,

and the other myth-makers about these things, and setting up their

poetry as a law, have supposed a certain deep place under the earth,

Hades, and that it is vast, and roomy, and gloomy, and sunless, and how

thought to be lighted up so as to behold every one within, I know

not.’[162] In the ancient Egyptian doctrine of the future life, modelled

on solar myth, the region of the departed combines the under-world and

the west, Amenti; the dead passes the gate of the setting sun to

traverse the roads of darkness, and behold his father Osiris; and with

this solar thought the Egyptian priests, representing in symbolic

ceremony the scenes of the other world, carried the corpse in the sacred

boat across to the burial-place, on the western side of the sacred

lake.[163] So, too, the cavernous Sheol of the Israelites, the shadowy

region of departed souls, lay deep below the earth. Through the great

Aryan religious systems, Brahmanism, Zarathustrism, Buddhism, and onward

into the range of Islam and of Christianity, subterranean hells of

purgatory or punishment make the doleful contrast to heavens of light

and glory.

It is, however, a point worthy of special notice that the conception of

hell as a fiery abyss, so familiar to the religions of the higher

civilization, is all but unknown to savage thought, so much so that if

met with, its genuineness is doubtful. Captain John Smith’s ‘History of

Virginia,’ published in 1624, contains two different accounts of the

Indians’ doctrine of a future life. Smith’s own description is of a land

beyond the mountains, toward sunset, where chiefs and medicine-men in

paint and feathers shall smoke, and sing, and dance with their

forefathers, while the common people have no life after death, but rot

in their graves. Heriot’s description is of tabernacles of the gods to

which the good are taken up to perpetual happiness, while the wicked are

carried to ‘Popogusso,’ a great pit which they think to be at the

furthest parts of the world where the sun sets, and there burn

continually.[164] Now knowing so much as we do of the religion of the

Algonquins, to whom these Virginians belonged, we may judge that while

the first account is genuinely native, though perhaps not quite

correctly understood, the second was borrowed by the Indians from the

white men themselves. Yet even here the touch of solar myth is manifest,

and the description of the fiery abyss in the region of sunset may be

compared with one from our own country, in the Anglo-Saxon dialogue of

Saturn and Solomon. ‘Saga me forhwan byth seo sunne read on æfen? Ic the

secge, forthon heo locath on helle.—Tell me, why is the sun red at even?

I tell thee, because she looketh on hell.’[165] To the same belief

belongs another striking mythic feature. The idea of volcanos being

mouths of the under-world seems not unexampled among the lower races,

for we hear of certain New Zealanders casting their dead down into a

crater.[166] But in connexion with the thought of a gehenna of fire and

brimstone, Vesuvius, Etna, and Hecla had spiritual as well as material

terrors to the mind of Christendom, for they were believed to be places

of purgatory or the very mouths of the pit where the souls of the damned

were cast down.[167] The Indians of Nicaragua used in old times to offer

human sacrifices to their volcano Masaya, flinging the corpses into the

crater, and in later years, after the conversion of the country, we hear

of Christian confessors sending their penitents to climb the mountain,

and (as a glimpse of hell) to look down upon the molten lava.[168]

Fourthly, in old times and new, it has come into men’s minds to fix upon

the sun and moon as abodes of departed souls. When we have learnt from

the rude Natchez of the Mississippi and the Apalaches of Florida that

the sun is the bright dwelling of departed chiefs and braves, and have

traced like thoughts on into the theologies of Mexico and Peru, then we

may compare these savage doctrines with Isaac Taylor’s ingenious

supposition in his ‘Physical Theory of Another Life,’—the sun of each

planetary system is the house of the higher and ultimate spiritual

corporeity, and the centre of assembly to those who have passed on the

planets their preliminary era of corruptible organization. Or perhaps

some may prefer the Rev. Tobias Swinden’s book, published in the last

century, and translated into French and German, which proved the sun to

be hell, and its dark spots gatherings of damned souls.[169] And when in

South America the Saliva Indians have pointed out the moon, their

paradise where no mosquitos are, and the Guaycurus have shown it as the

home of chiefs and medicine-men deceased, and the Polynesians of Tokelau

in like manner have claimed it as the abode of departed kings and

chiefs, then these pleasant fancies may be compared with Plutarch’s

description of the virtuous souls who after purification in the middle

space gain their footing on the moon, and there are crowned as

victors.[170] The converse notion of the moon as the seat of hell, has

been elaborated in profoundest bathos by Mr. M. F. Tupper:

‘I know thee well, O Moon, thou cavern’d realm,

Sad Satellite, thou giant ash of death,

Blot on God’s firmament, pale home of crime,

Scarr’d prison-house of sin, where damned souls

Feed upon punishment. Oh, thought sublime,

That amid night’s black deeds, when evil prowls

Through the broad world, thou, watching sinners well,

Glarest o’er all, the wakeful eye of—Hell!’

Skin for skin, the brown savage is not ill matched in such speculative

lore with the white philosopher.

Fifthly, as Paradise on the face of the earth, and Hades beneath it

where the sun goes down, are regions whose existence is asserted or not

denied by savage and barbaric science, so it is with Heaven. Among the

examples which display for us the real course of knowledge among

mankind, and the real relation which primitive bears to later culture,

the belief in the existence of a firmament is one of the most

instructive. It arises naturally in the minds of children still, and in

accordance with the simplest childlike thought, the cosmologies of the

North American Indians[171] and the South Sea Islanders[172] describe

their flat earth arched over by the solid vault of heaven. Like thoughts

are to be traced on through such details as the Zulu idea that the blue

heaven is a rock encircling the earth, inside which are the sun, moon,

and stars, and outside which dwell the people of heaven; the modern

negro’s belief that there is a firmament stretched above like a cloth or

web; the Finnish poem which tells how Ilmarinen forged the firmament of

finest steel, and set in it the moon and stars.[173] The New Zealander,

with his notion of a solid firmament, through which the waters can be

let down on earth through a crack or hole from the reservoir of rain

above, could well explain the passage in Herodotus concerning that place

in North Africa where, as the Libyans said, the sky is pierced, as well

as the ancient Jewish conception of a firmament of heaven, ‘strong as a

molten mirror,’ with its windows through which the rain pours down in

deluge from the reservoirs above, windows which late Rabbinical

literature tells us were made by taking out two stars.[174] In nations

where the theory of the firmament prevails, accounts of bodily journeys

or spiritual ascents to heaven are in general meant not as figure, but

as fact. Among the lower races, the tendency to localize the region of

departed souls above the sky seems less strong than that which leads

them to place their world of the dead on or below the earth’s surface.

Yet some well-marked descriptions of a savage Heaven are on record, the

following, and others to be cited presently. Even some Australians seem

to think of going up to the clouds at death, to eat and drink, and hunt

and fish as here.[175] In North America, the Winnebagos placed their

paradise in the sky, where souls travel along that ‘Path of the Dead’

which we call the Milky Way; and working out the ever-recurring solar

idea, the modern Iroquois speak of the soul going upward and westward,

till it comes out on the beauteous plains of heaven, with people and

trees and things as on earth.[176] In South America the Guarayos,

representatives in some sort of the past condition of the Guarani race,

worship Tamoi the Grandfather, the Ancient of Heaven; he was their first

ancestor, who lived among them in old days and taught them to till the

ground; then rising to heaven in the East he disappeared, having

promised to be the helper of his people on earth, and to transport them,

when they died, from the top of a sacred tree into another life, where

they shall find their kindred and have hunting in plenty, and possess

all that they possessed on earth; therefore it is that the Guarayos

adorn their dead, and burn their weapons for them, and bury them with

their faces to the East, whither they are to go.[177] Among American

peoples whose culture rose to a higher level than that of these savage

tribes, we hear of the Peruvian Heaven, the glorious ‘Upper World,’ and

of the temporary abode of Aztec warriors on heavenly wooded plains,

where the sun shines when it is night on earth, wherefore it was a

Mexican saying that the sun goes at evening to lighten the dead.[178]

What thoughts of heaven were in the minds of the old Aryan poets, this

hymn from the Rig-Veda may show:—

‘Where there is eternal light, in the world where the sun is placed,

in that immortal imperishable world place me, O Soma!

Where king Vaivasvata reigns, where the secret place of heaven is,

where these mighty waters are, there make me immortal!

Where life is free, in the third heaven of heavens, where the worlds

are radiant, there make me immortal!

Where wishes and desires are, where the place of the bright sun is,

where there is freedom and delight, there make me immortal!

Where there is happiness and delight, where joy and pleasure reside,

where the desires of our desire are attained, there make me

immortal!’[179]

In such bright vague thoughts from the poet’s religion of nature, or in

cosmic schemes of ancient astronomy, with their artificial glories of

barbaric architecture exaggerated in the skies, or in the raptures of

mystic vision, or in the calmer teaching of the theologic doctrine of a

future life, descriptions of realms of blessed souls in heaven are to be

followed through the religions of the Brahman, the Buddhist, the Parsi,

the later Jew, the Moslem, and the Christian.

For the object, not of writing a handbook of religions, but of tracing

the relation which the religion of savages bears to the religion of

cultured nations, these details are enough to show the general line of

human thought regarding the local habitations of departed souls. It

seems plain from the most cursory inspection of these various

localizations, however much we may consider them as inherited or

transmitted from people to people in the complex movements of

theological history, that they are at any rate not derived from any

single religion accepted among ancient or primæval men. They bear

evident traces of independent working out in the varied definition of

the region of souls, as on earth among men, on earth in some distant

country, below the earth, above or beyond the sky. Similar ideas of this

kind are found in different lands, but this similarity seems in large

measure due to independent recurrence of thoughts so obvious. Not less

is independent fancy compatible with the ever-recurring solar myth in

such ideas, placing the land of Death in the land of Evening or of

Night, and its entrance at the gates of Sunset. Barbaric poets of many a

distant land must have gazed into the West to read the tale of Life and

Death, and tell it of Man. If, however, we look more closely into the

stages of intellectual history to which these theories of the Future

World belong, it will appear that the assignment of the realm of

departed souls to the three great regions, Earth, Hades, Heaven, has not

been uniform. Firstly, the doctrine of a land of souls on Earth belongs

widely and deeply to savage culture, but dwindles in the barbaric stage,

and survives but feebly into the mediæval. Secondly, the doctrine of a

subterranean Hades holds as large a place as this in savage belief, and

has held it firmly along the course of higher religions, where, however,

this under-world is looked on less and less as the proper abode of the

dead, but rather as the dismal place of purgatory and hell. Lastly, the

doctrine of a Heaven, floored upon a firmament, or placed in the upper

air, seems in early savage belief less common than the other two, but

yields to neither of them in its vigorous retention by the thought of

modern nations. These local theories appear to be taken, firstly and

mostly, in the most absolute literal sense, and although, under the

influence of physical science, much that was once distinctly-meant

philosophy has now passed among theologians into imagery and metaphor,

yet at low levels of knowledge the new canons of interpretation find

little acceptance, and even in modern Europe the rude cosmology of the

lower races in no small measure retains its place.

Turning now to consider the state of the departed in these their new

homes, we have to examine the definitions of the Future Life which

prevail through the religions of mankind. In these doctrines there is

much similarity caused by the spreading of established beliefs into new

countries, and also much similarity that is beyond what such

transmission can account for. So there is much variety due to local

colour and circumstance, and also much variety beyond the reach of such

explanation. The main causes of both similarity and variety seem to lie

far deeper, in the very origin and inmost meaning of the doctrines. The

details of the future life, among the lower races and upwards, are no

heterogeneous mass of arbitrary fancies. Classified, they range

themselves naturally round central ideas, in groups whose correspondence

seems to indicate the special course of their development. Amongst the

pictures into which this world has shaped its expectations of the next,

two great conceptions are especially to be discerned. The one is that

the future life is, as it were, a reflexion of this; in a new world,

perhaps of dreamy beauty, perhaps of ghostly gloom, men are to retain

their earthly forms and their earthly conditions, to have around them

their earthly friends, to possess their earthly property, to carry on

their earthly occupations. The other is that the future life is a

compensation for this, where men’s conditions are re-allotted as the

consequence, and especially as the reward or punishment, of their

earthly life. The first of these two ideas we may call (with Captain

Burton) the ‘continuance-theory,’ contrasting with it the second as the

‘retribution-theory.’ Separately or combined, these two doctrines are

the keys of the subject, and by grouping typical examples under their

two headings, it will be possible to survey systematically man’s most

characteristic schemes of his life beyond the grave.

To the doctrine of Continuance belongs especially the savage view of the

spirit-land, that it is as the dream-land where the souls of the living

so often go to visit the souls of the dead. There the soul of the dead

Karen, with the souls of his axe and cleaver, builds his house and cuts

his rice; the shade of the Algonquin hunter hunts souls of beaver and

elk, walking on the souls of his snow-shoes over the soul of the snow;

the fur-wrapped Kamchadal drives his dog-sledge; the Zulu milks his cows

and drives his cattle to kraal; South American tribes live on, whole or

mutilated, healthy or sick, as they left this world, leading their old

lives, and having their wives with them again, though indeed, as the

Araucanians said, they have no more children, for they are but

souls.[180] Soul-land is dream-land in its shadowy unreal pictures, for

which, nevertheless, material reality so plainly furnished the models,

and it is dream-land also in its vivid idealization of the soberer

thoughts and feelings of waking life.

‘There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Apparell’d in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.’

Well might the Mohawk Indian describe the good land of paradise, as he

had seen it in a dream. The shade of the Ojibwa follows a wide and

beaten path that leads toward the West, he crosses a deep and rapid

water, and reaching a country full of game and all things the Indian

covets, he joins his kindred in their long lodge.[181] So, on the

southern continent, the Bolivian Yuracarés will go, all of them, to a

future life where there will be plenty of hunting, and Brazilian

forest-tribes will find a pleasant forest full of calabash-trees and

game, where the souls of the dead will live happily in company.[182] The

Greenlanders hoped that their souls—pale, soft, disembodied forms which

the living could not grasp—would lead a life better than that of earth,

and never ceasing. It might be in heaven, reached by the rainbow, where

the souls pitch their tents round the great lake rich in fish and fowl,

the lake whose waters above the firmament overflowing make rain on

earth, and if its banks broke, there would be another deluge. But

gaining the most and best of their living from the depths of the sea,

they were also apt to think the land of Torngarsuk to be below the sea

or earth, and to be entered by the deep holes in the rocks. Perpetual

summer is there, ever beauteous sunshine, and no night, good water and

superfluity of birds and fish, seals and reindeer to be caught without

difficulty, or found alive seething in a great kettle.[183] In the

Kimbunda country of South-West Africa, souls live on in ‘Kalunga,’ the

world where it is day when it is night here; and with plenty of food and

drink, and women to serve them, and hunting and dancing for pastime,

they lead a life which seems a corrected edition of this.[184] On

comparison of these pictures of the future life with such as have

expressed the longings of more cultured nations, there appear indeed

different details, but the principle is ever the same—the idealization

of earthly good. The Norseman’s ideal is sketched in the few broad

touches which show him in Walhalla, where he and the other warriors

without number ride forth arrayed each morning and hew each other on

Odin’s plain, till the slain have been ‘chosen’ as in earthly battle,

and meal-tide comes, and slayers and slain mount and ride home to feast

on the everlasting boar, and drink mead and ale with the Æsir.[185] To

understand the Moslem’s mind, we must read the two chapters of the Koran

where the Prophet describes the faithful in the garden of delights,

reclining on their couches of gold and gems, served by children ever

young, with bowls of liquor whose fumes will not rise into the drinkers’

heads, living among the thornless lotus-trees and date-palms loaded to

the ground, feasting on the fruits they love and the meat of the rarest

birds, with the houris near them with beautiful black eyes, like pearls

in the shell, where no idle or wicked speech is heard, but only the

words ‘Peace, Peace.’

‘They who fear the judgment of God shall have two gardens.