The myths of the Origin of Death fall into a few categories. In many
legends of the lower races men are said to have become subject to
mortality because they infringed some mystic prohibition or taboo of the
sort which is common among untutored peoples. The apparently
untrammelled Polynesian, or Australian, or African, is really the slave
of countless traditions, which forbid him to eat this object or to touch
that, or to speak to such and such a person, or to utter this or that
word. Races in this curious state of ceremonial subjection often account
for death as the punishment imposed for breaking some taboo. In other
cases, death is said to have been caused by a sin of omission, not of
commission. People who have a complicated and minute ritual (like so
many of the lower races) persuade themselves that Death burst on the
world when some passage of the ritual was first omitted, or when some
custom was first infringed. Yet again, Death is fabled to have first
claimed us for his victims in consequence of the erroneous delivery of a
favourable message from some powerful supernatural being, or because of
the failure of some enterprise which would have resulted in the overthrow
of Death, or by virtue of a pact or covenant between Death and the gods.
Thus it will be seen that death is often (though by no means invariably)
the penalty of infringing a command, or of indulging in a culpable
curiosity. But there are cases, as we shall see, in which death, as a
tolerably general law, follows on a mere accident. Some one is
accidentally killed, and this 'gives Death a lead' (as they say in the
hunting-field) over the fence which had hitherto severed him from the
world of living men. It is to be observed in this connection that the
first of men who died is usually regarded as the discoverer of a hitherto
'unknown country,' the land beyond the grave, to which all future men
must follow him. Bin dir Woor, among the Australians, was the first man
who suffered death, and he (like Yama in the Vedic myth) became the
Columbus of the new world of the dead.