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.

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.

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.

Which of the benefits of God will ye deny?

Adorned with groves.

Which of the benefits of God will ye deny?

In each of them shall spring two fountains.

Which of the benefits of God will ye deny?

In each of them shall grow two kinds of fruits.

Which of the benefits of God will ye deny?

They shall lie on carpets brocaded with silk and embroidered with gold; the fruits of the two gardens shall be near, easy to pluck.

Which of the benefits of God will ye deny?