notions concerning the nature of man and his relation to external things
which they preserve. They have amused our youth-hood; they may instruct
our manhood. But if we go to the solar mythologists for their
interpretation, we shall learn from Sir G. W. Cox that the “magician
Punchkin and the heartless giant are only other forms of the Panis who
steal bright treasures from the gleaming west,” that “Balna herself is
Helen shut up in Ilion ... the eagles the bright clouds,”[76] and from
Professor de Gubernatis that the duck is the dawn and the egg the sun.
These venerable tales have a larger, richer meaning than this, expressive
of the wonder deep-seated in the heart of man. Like the “drusy” cavity in
granite rock which, when broken open, reveals beautiful prisms of topaz
and beryl, the folk-tales disclose under analysis that thought, now
crystallised, which confuses ideas and objects, illusions and realities,
substances and shadows.
§ IX.
BARBARIC AND CIVILISED NOTIONS OF THE SOUL’S NATURE.
In proof of the closing remarks in § VII., that the breath has given the
chief name to the soul, we find the Western Australians using the same
word, _waug_, for “breath, spirit, soul”; in Java the word _nawa_ is used
for “health, life, soul”; in the Dakota tongue _niya_ is literally
“breath,” figuratively “life”; in Netela _piuts_ is “breath” and “soul”;
in Eskimo _silla_ means “air” and “wind,” and is also the word that
conveys the highest idea of the world as a whole, and of the reasoning
faculty. The supreme existence they call _Sillam Innua_, Owner of the Air,
or of the All; in the Yakama tongue of Oregon _wkrisha_ signifies “there
is wind,” _wkrishwit_, “life”; with the Aztecs _ehecatl_ expressed “air,
life, and the soul,” and, personified in their myths, it was said to have
been born of the breath of Tezcatlipoca, their highest divinity, who
himself is often called Yoalliehecatl, the Wind of Night.[77] This
identity of wind with breath, of breath with spirit, and thence of spirit
with the Great Spirit, which
“Sees God in clouds, and hears Him in the wind,”
has further illustration in the legends of the Quiches, in which the
unknown creative power is Hurakan, a name familiar to us under the form
_hurricane_, and in our own sacred records, where the advent of the Holy
Spirit is described “as of a rushing mighty wind.” In the Mohawk language
_atonritz_, the “soul,” is from _atonrion_, “to breathe”; whilst, as
showing the analogy between the effects of restricted sense and restricted
civilisation, Dr. Tylor quotes the case of a girl who was a deaf-mute as
well as blind, and who, when telling a dream in gesture language, said:
“I thought God took away my breath to heaven.” Among the higher languages
the same evidence abides.
“The spirit doth but mean the breath.”
That word _spirit_ is derived from a verb _spirare_, which means “to draw
breath.” _Animus_, “the mind,” is cognate with _anima_, “air”; in Irish,
which belongs to the same family of speech as Latin, namely, the Aryan or
Indo-European, we have _anal_, “breath,” and _anam_, “life,” or “soul”;
and in Sanskrit we find the root _an_, to “blow” or “breathe,” whence
_anila_, “wind,” and in Greek _anemos_, with the like meaning. In
Hampole’s _Ayenbite of Inwyt_, _i.e._ “Prick or Remorse of Conscience,” a
poem of the fourteenth century, we find _ande_ or “breath” used as “soul.”
“Thus sall ilka saul other se (_i.e._ in the other world)
For nan of tham may feled be
Na mar than here a man, ande may
When it passes fra his mouthe away.”[78]
The Greek _psyche_, _pneuma_, and _thymos_, each meaning “soul” and
“spirit,” are from roots expressing the wind or breath. In Slavonic the
root _du_ has developed the meaning of breath into that of soul or spirit,
and the dialect of the gipsies has _duk_ with the meanings of breath,
spirit, ghost. That word _ghost_, the German _geist_, the Dutch _geest_,
from a root meaning “to blow with violence,” is connected with _gust_,
_gas_, _geyser_; in Scandinavian, _glösor_, “to pour forth.” In non-Aryan
languages, as the Finnish, _far_ means “soul, breath, spirit, wind”;
_henki_, “spirit, person, breath, air”; the Hebrew _nephesh_, “breath,”
has also the meanings of “life, soul, mind”; and _ruach_ and _neshamah_,
to which the Arabic _nefs_ and _ruh_ correspond, pass from meaning
“breath” to “spirit.” The legend of man’s creation records that he became
a living soul through God breathing into his nostrils “the breath of
life,” and concerning this the Psalmist says of all that live, “Thou
takest away their breath, they die, and return unto the dust.” As a final
illustration, the Egyptian _kneph_ has the alternative meanings of “life”
and “breath.”[79]
When we pass from names to descriptions, we find the same underlying idea
of the ethereal nature of spirit. The natives of Nicaragua, California,
and other countries remote from these, agree in describing the other self
as air or breeze, which passes in and out through the mouth and nostrils.
The Tongans conceived it as the aëriform part of the body, related to it
as the perfume to the flower. The Greenlanders describe it as pale and
soft, as without flesh and bone, so that he who tries to seize it grasps
nothing. The Lapps say that the ghosts are invisible to all but the
Shamans. The Congo negroes leave the house of the dead unswept for a year,
lest the dust should injure the delicate substance of the ghost; and the
German peasants have a saying that a door should not be slammed, lest a
soul gets pinched in it. In some parts of Northern Europe, when the
wind-god, Odin, rides the sky with his furious spectral host, the peasants
open the windows of every sick-room that the soul of the dying may have
free exit to join the wild chase; whilst both here and in France it is
still no uncommon practice to open doors and windows that the soul may
depart quickly. Dr. Tylor[80] cites a passage from Hampole, in which the
author speaks of the intenser suffering which the soul undergoes in
purgatory by reason of its delicate organisation.
“The soul is more tendre and nesche (soft)
Than the bodi that hath bones and fleysche;
Thanne the soul that is so tendere of kinde,
Mote nedis hure penaunce hardere-y-finde,
Than eni bodi that evere on live was,”
a doctrine clearly due to Patristic theories of incorporeal souls. And a
modern poet, Dante Rossetti, in his _Blessed Damozel_, when he describes
her as leaning out from the gold bar of heaven and looking down towards
the earth, that “spins like a fretful midge,” whence she awaits the coming
of her lover, depicts the souls mounting up to God as passing by her “like
thin flames.” The Greeks and, following them, the Romans, conceived the
soul as of thin, impalpable texture, as exhaled with the dying breath, or,
as in Homer, rushing out through the wound that causes the warrior’s
death. In the metaphysical Arabian romance of Yokdhan, the hero seeks the
source of life and thought, and discovers in one of the cavities of the
heart a bluish vapour, which was the living soul. Among the Hebrews it was
of shadowy nature, with echoless motion, haunting a ghostly realm:
“It is a land of shadows; yea, the land
Itself is but a shadow, and the race
That dwell therein are voices, forms of forms.”
Such conceptions are but little varied; and, to this day, the intelligence
of the major number of people who think about the thing at all presents
the departing soul as something vaporous, as a little white cloud.
In keeping with such ideas, the belief in transfer of spirit expresses
itself. Algonquin women who desired to become mothers flocked to the couch
of those about to die, in hope that the vital principle as it passed from
the body would enter theirs. Among the Seminoles of Florida, when a woman
died in childbirth, the infant was held over her face to receive her
parting spirit, and thus acquire strength and knowledge for its future
use. So among the Tákahlis, the priest is accustomed to lay his hand on
the head of the nearest relative of the deceased, and to blow into him the
soul of the departed, which is supposed to come to life in his next
child.[81]
In Harland and Wilkinson’s _Lancashire Folk-lore_ it is related that while
a well-known witch lay dying, “she must needs, before she could ‘shuffle
off this mortal coil,’ transfer her _familiar spirit_ to some trusty
successor. An intimate acquaintance from a neighbouring township was
consequently sent for in all haste, and on her arrival was immediately
closeted with her dying friend. What passed between them has never fully
transpired, but it is asserted that at the close of the interview this
associate _received the witch’s last breath into her mouth, and with it
her familiar spirit_. The powers for good or evil of the dreaded woman
were thus transferred to her companion, and on passing along the road from
Burnley to Blackburn we can point out a farmhouse at no great distance,
with whose thrifty matron no neighbouring farmer will yet dare to
quarrel.” When a Roman lay at the point of death, his nearest relative
inhaled the last breath; in New Testament story, the risen Jesus breathes
on His disciples, that they may receive the Holy Spirit, and the form thus
adopted in conferring supernatural grace is still used in the rites and
ceremonies of the Catholic Church.
Speculation about the other self could not, however, stop at identifying
it with a man’s breath or shadow, or with regarding it as absolutely
impalpable. These nebulous and gaseous theories necessarily condensed, as
it were, into theories of semi-substantiality still charged with ethereal
conceptions, but giving embodiment to the soul to account for the
appearances of both dead and living in dreams, when their persons were
clasped, their forms and features seen, and their voices heard.
Such theories involve a kind of continuity of identity, and often take the
form of belief in the soul as a replica of the body, and as suffering
corresponding mutilation. When the native Australian has slain his foe, he
cuts off his right thumb, so as to prevent him from throwing a shadowy
spear; the Chinese dread of decapitation, lest their spirits are headless,
is well known; but a more telling illustration is that cited by Dr. Tylor,
from Waitz, of the West Indian planter, whose slaves sought refuge from
the lash and toil in suicide. But he was too cunning for them; he cut off
the heads and hands of the corpses, that the survivors might see that not
even death could save them from a taskmaster who could maim their souls in
the next world. Among advanced nations the same conceptions survived.
Achilles, resting by the shore, sees the dead Patroclus in a dream. “Ay
me, there remaineth then, even in the house of Hades, a spirit and phantom
of the dead, albeit the life be not anywise therein; for all night long
hath the ghost of hapless Patroclus stood over me, wailing and making
moan, and wondrous like his living self it seemed.”[82] Virgil portrays
Æneas, and Homer describes Ulysses, as recognising their old comrades
when they enter the “viewless shades,” where the dwellers continue the
tasks of their earthly life. In Hebrew legend Saul recognises the shade of
Samuel when the magic spell of the Witch of Endor evokes it, although the
grave of the old “judge” was sixty miles away. The monarch-shades of
“Sheol” hail with derision the entrance of the King of Babylon among them.
In New Testament narrative the risen Jesus is alternately material and
spiritual, now passing through closed doors, and now submitting his
wound-prints to the touch of the doubter. In _Hamlet_ the ghost is as “the
air, invulnerable,” yet “like a king” ...
“... that fair and warlike form
In which the majesty of buried Denmark
Did sometimes march.”
Notions of material punishments and rewards involved notions of a material
soul, even pending its reunion with the body at the general resurrection.
The angels are depicted as weighing souls in a literal balance, while
devils clinging to the scales endeavour to disturb the equilibrium.[83] In
some frescoes of the fourteenth century, on the walls of the Campo Santo,
at Pisa, illustrations of these notions abound; the soul is portrayed as a
sexless child rising out of the mouth of the corpse, and eagerly awaited
as the crown of rejoicing of the angels, or as the lawful prey of the
demons. After this it is amusing to learn that extreme tests of the
weight of ghosts are now and then forthcoming,[84] from the assertion of a
Basuto divine that the late queen had been bestriding his shoulders, and
he never felt such a weight in his life, to the alleged modern
spiritualistic reckoning of the weight of a human soul at from three to
four ounces! And do not spirit-photographs adorn the albums of the
credulous?
§ X.
BARBARIC BELIEF IN SOULS IN BRUTES AND PLANTS AND LIFELESS THINGS.
More graceful is the conception which makes the soul spring up as a flower
or cleave the air as a bird. It is, of course, the purified survival of
the primitive thought which did not limit its belief in an indwelling
spirit to man, but extended it to brutes and plants, and even to lifeless
things. For the lower creatures manifested the phenomena from which the
belief in spirits in higher creatures was inferred. They moved and
breathed, their life ceased with their breath; they cast shadows and
reflections; their cries, which to the savage seemed so like human
speech,[85] awakened echoes; and they appeared in dreams. Among the
western tribes of North America the phantoms of all animals are supposed
to go to the happy beasts’ grounds, and in Assam the ghosts of those slain
become the property of the hunter who kills them; whilst the custom of
begging pardon of the animal before or after despatching it, as among the
Red Indians, who even put the pipe of peace in the dead creature’s mouth,
further evidences to barbarian belief in beast-souls. Although the belief
in the immortality of brutes has now no place in serious philosophy, it
has been a favourite doctrine from the Kamchadales, who believe in the
after-life of flies and bugs, to the eminent naturalist Agassiz, who
advocates the doctrine in his _Essay on Classification_; and in a list of
4977 books on the nature and future of the soul given in Mr. Alger’s
elaborate critical history of the subject, nearly 200 deal with the
after-life of animals. The advocates have often felt the difficulty of
granting this after-life to man and denying it to creatures to which he
stands so closely related in ultimate community of origin; but science,
while it finds links of sympathy with the ideas of rude races respecting
the common life of all that moves, and presents evidence in support of the
common destiny, lends no support to the doctrine of the immortality of
oysters. The custom of apologising to doomed brutes is practised in regard
to plants. If they exhibit the phenomena of life in a lesser degree,
enough are shown to justify the accrediting of them with souls. Besides
flinging wavy shadows and reflections (and it cannot be too often enforced
that to the barbaric intelligence motion is a prime sign of life), they
are not voiceless. Murmurs are heard in their leaves; sounds echo from
their hollow trunks, or tremble, Æolian-like, through their branches; and
in their juices are the sources of repose or frenzy.
“The Ojibways believed that trees had souls, and in pagan times they
seldom cut down green or living trees, for they thought it put them to
pain. They pretended to hear the wailing of the trees when they suffered
in this way. On account of these noises, real or imaginary, trees have had
spirits assigned them, and worship offered to them. A mountain-ash, in the
vicinity of South Ste. Marie, which made a noise, had offerings piled up
around it. If a tree should emit from its hollow trunk or branches a sound
during a calm state of the atmosphere, or should any one fancy such
sounds, the tree would be at once reported, and soon come to be regarded
as the residence of some local god.”[86] As expressed in Greek myth,
purified in this case from grosser elements, we have the Dryades, who were
believed to die together with the trees in which their life had begun to
be, and in which they had dwelt. As expressed in folk-lore and its poetic
forms, it is in the growth or blossoming of flowers, or the intertwining
of branches, that the idea survives. In the ballad of “Fair Margaret and
Sweet William”--
“Out of her brest there sprang a _rose_,
And out of his a _briar_;
They grew till they grew unto the church-top,
And there they tyed in a true lover’s knot;”[87]
in the story of “Tristram and Ysonde,” “from his grave there grew an
eglantine which twined about the statue, a marvel for all men to see; and,
though three times they cut it down, it grew again, and ever wound its
arms about the image of the fair Ysonde;”[88] while the conception often
lends itself to the poet’s thoughts, from Laertes’ words over Ophelia:--
“Lay her i’ the earth,
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring,”
to Tennyson’s
“And from his ashes may be made
The violet of his native land.”
In Grimm’s _Teutonic Mythology_ a number of illustrations are supplied of
the vagaries of popular imagination, which picture the soul as a bird
flying out of a dead person’s mouth, and, as a cognate example from rude
culture, we find a belief among the Powhatans that “a certain small wood
bird received the souls of their princes at death, and they religiously
refrained from doing it harm; while the Aztecs and various other nations
thought that all good people, as a reward of merit, were metamorphosed at
the close of life into feathered songsters of the grove, and in this form
passed a certain term in the umbrageous bowers of Paradise.”[89] But many
pages might be filled with examples of varying conceptions of the soul,
the major number of which (for the idea of it as a mouse, snake, etc.,
must not be forgotten) have as their nucleus its ethereal nature and
freedom from the limitations of solid earth, although round that nucleus
gather some more concrete ideas for the mind, desiring something more
substantial than symbols, to grasp. The belief that inanimate things as
well as animals and plants have a dual being is not so obvious at first
sight, and yet, given the reasons for the latter, there are as good
grounds, because like in kind, for the former. The Algonquins told Father
Charlevoix that “since hatchets and kettles have shadows, as well as men
and women, it follows that these shadows must pass along with human
shadows into the spirit-land.” When the tools or weapons are injured or
done with, their souls must cross the water to the Great Village, where
the sun sets. Besides, spears and pots and pans, as well as men and dogs,
appear in dreams; they throw shadows and images in the water, they give
forth a sound when struck, and, as the Fijians also argue, “if an animal
or plant die, its soul goes to Bolotoo; if a stone or anything else is
broken, it has its reward there; nay, has equal good luck with men and
hogs and yams. If an axe or a chisel is worn out or broken up, away flies
its soul for the service of the gods.” Logically, the savage who believes
that in the other world
“The hunter still the deer pursues,
The hunter and the deer a shade,”
must put in the hands of the one a shadow spear. So when an Ojibway
chief, after a four days’ trance, gave an account of his visit to the land
of shadows, he told of the hosts whom he had met travelling there laden
with pipes and kettles and weapons. These primitive ideas explain, once
and for all, matters which have too often been explained by fanciful
theories, or cited as evidences of the benighted condition of those places
which on missionary maps of the world are painted black. They disclose the
reason why food and utensils and weapons were broken and buried with the
dead; why fires were lighted round the grave; why animals were slain on
the death of a chief; why the Greenlanders, when a child dies, bury a dog
with him, because the dog, they say, is able to find his way anywhere; why
North American Indian mothers in pathetic custom drop their milk on the
lips of the dead child; and why, what seemed so inexplicable to the early
missionaries to the East, ignorant of the practice of widow-sacrifice
among the ancient peoples of the West, as the Gauls, Teutons, and others,
wives and slaves were burned on the funeral pyre. Among the Mexicans
sometimes a very rich man would even have his chaplain slaughtered, that
he might not be deprived of his support in the other world.
In their initial stage all these gifts are made, all these rites
performed, for the supposed need of the dead. Every one had his _manes_,
which followed him into the next world, and, lacking which, he would be as
poor as if in this world he had lacked it. The spiritual counterpart of
the offerings was consumed by his spirit, just as the old deities were
thought to enjoy the sweet-smelling savour of the burnt sacrifices; the
fires were kindled that the soul might not grope about in darkness. So the
obolus was put into the mouth of the dead, that its _manes_ might be
payment to Charon for the ferry of the Styx, as money is put in the
corpse’s hand or mouth among the German and Irish peasants to this day; so
the warrior’s horse was slain at his tomb and the armour laid therein,
that he might enter Valhalla riding, and clothed with the tokens of his
right to the abode reserved for those who had fallen in battle.
Any explanation of customs like the foregoing, persistent as they are in
kind, however varying in expression, is defective which does not take into
account what large part the emotions play in all that is connected with
death, and how they infuse such customs with vitality. The bereaved refuse
to believe that those whom they have lost have no more concern in the
interests of life once common and dear to both. As among the Dakotas, when
a mother feels a pain at her breast, they say that her dead child is
thinking of her. The place where the body lies becomes the connecting link
between it and the soul which is still the solicitude and care, or, it may
be, the dread of the living; succouring and protecting, or, on the other
hand, avenging.
The element of dread undoubtedly comes into play early. The awe which we
feel in the presence of death, or in passing in the dark through a
churchyard, takes in the savage the form of terror. The behaviour of the
ghost in dreams, its ability to do what men still in the flesh cannot do,
quicken the belief in occult power, and the desire to propitiate it. Among
the Lapps red-hot stones are cast behind the coffins of the dead, and
their graves fenced round to prevent their return to earth. The articles
placed in the grave as gifts for the dead become sacrifices laid on the
altar to appease malignant spirits; the mound or tomb becomes a temple,
and awe passes by easy degrees into worship. The prevalence in one form or
another of ancestor-worship has, as remarked already, led Mr. Spencer to
the conclusion that it is the rudimentary form of all religions; even sun,
moon, volcano, river, etc., being feared and adored because they were
believed to be the dwelling-places of ancestral ghosts. The facts are
against this theory. It is to the larger, the more impressive phenomena of
the natural world, the sun in noontide strength and splendour, the
lightning and the thunder, that we must look for the primary causes which
awakened the fear, the wonder, and the adoration in which lie the germs of
the highest religions. Such causes are not only sufficient, but more
operative on the undeveloped intelligence than the belief in ancestral
spirits of the mountain and the sea, which involves a more complex mental
action.[90] The one is contributory, but subordinate, to the other. It is,
as M. Réville remarks, “the phenomena of nature regarded as animated and
conscious that wake and stimulate the religious sentiments, and become
the objects of the adoration of man.... If nature-worship, with the
animism that it engenders,[91] shapes the first law to which nascent
religion submits in the human race, anthropomorphism furnishes the second,
disengaging itself ever more and more completely from the zoomorphism
which generally serves as an intermediary. This is so _everywhere_.”[92]
§ XI.
BARBARIC AND CIVILISED NOTIONS ABOUT THE SOUL’S DWELLING-PLACE.