SINCE evidence of the existence of the belief that the soul lives on is so indubitable, the question arises--what is its condition? In what state does the discarnate spirit find itself after final separation from the body? And first, as to what we may be allowed to call, for want of a better term, its physical condition.
We have already noted that soul is conceived as having both form and substance, the latter, so to speak, greatly rarefied. Moreover, it has been brought to our attention that the most common idea concerning form is that the soul is a replica of the body it inhabited. Consistency in primitive thinking is not to be assumed, as we have seen, nor are logical processes among primitives quite the same as ours. Yet when a disembodied soul took up its post-mortem residence in a serpent, for example, we may not suppose that that soul was still regarded as human in shape. But so far as the author has discovered, no decisive evidence exists on this point. The probabilities favor greatly the supposition that in such cases transformation of the soul shape was supposed to have taken place. Evidence of the common idea, retention by the soul of its human shape, has been before us. We have noted that some tribes mutilate the body of the dead, thinking that by so doing they inflict like wounds upon the soul and thus impose incapacity for harm upon the ghost, the double of the body. The Omahas slit the soles of a murdered man's feet that his spirit may be unable to return and cause damage to the people.[1] Mangaeans prefer death in battle--men are then in their full strength; disease weakens them, and souls have the nature of the body at death. Barongo believe that souls are young or old, according to the age at death, and so do the Indians of Gran Chaco. Naga tribes of Manipur think that ghosts bear whatever tattoo marks, mutilations, or other blemishes or embellishments occurred on the body. Some people carry this idea so far as to prefer
[1. Fletcher and La Flesche, 27th Report, etc., p. 215.]
death before decay of natural powers sets in, and so commit suicide or are buried alive, that the soul may continue to exist in full vigor.[2]
Having form and substance, the soul has certain physical needs. It hungers, thirsts, feels cold and heat. The degrees of grossness of these wants vary greatly. Sometimes the hunger, thirst, and wants and passions may be appeased by the mere spirit or ghost of food, drink, etc.; and the ghosts are served by the spirits or (as our theosophical friends might be imagined as saying) the astral bodies of dishes, implements, or weapons which are destroyed (i.e., killed) that their spirits may accompany the ghost into the spirit land. Indeed, this is by all odds the most prevalent conception. Sometimes it is the more evanescent or the more vital elements, such as the blood, which are used by the ghost, as in the celebrated case of Tiresias in the Odyssey[3]. The cases already cited of food, drink, weapons, utensils, and the like possessing souls and being offered or placed with the dead, oftentimes being broken or mutilated so as to "kill"
[2. Cases are cited in Frazer's Dying God, pp. 9-14.
3 Book XI.]
them, furnish direct testimony to the supposed needs of the ghost. The hunger felt by the disembodied soul is vividly expressed by most African tribes, whose belief is that ghosts can and do eat even human bodies A Ghosts also suffer from cold, hence New Guineans, and others, make fires at the graves, and even build huts, so that when the ghosts come up from the body they may find comfort.'
Ghosts have voices, too, but thin and shadowy like themselves. They chirp like crickets or utter their words in whistling tones. So the wizards by ventriloquistic art impose upon the credulous, and by wheezing utterance produce the effect of communications from a shadowy being or from the ground. Note the indications of shamanistic practice in the Prophet Isaiah (8:19- 29:4).
What we may regard as the disposition of the ghost is by most peoples held to be fixed by the character of the person while on earth.
[4. Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, pp. 224-225, 232-233, 238, etc.; ERE, vi. 65 ff. The testimony is being exhaustively collected in Frazer, Belief in Immortality--see the Index, under "Food."
5. Brown, Melanesians and Polynesians, pp. 442 ff.; Neuhass, Deutsch Neu-Guinea, iii. S18; Frazer, Belief in Immortality, i. 150-152.]
Was he cruel, warlike, passionate, generous, revengeful in the body, so will he be as a discarnate ghost. So, for instance, the New Guineans hold.[6] Only account must be taken of a very common notion, that the ghost is endowed with increased power.[7] One might find many reasons for this common idea. The general fearsomeness of the unknown and invisible, the fad that the ghost has joined the terrible host of free spirits, its very remoteness, combine to add the idea of power. That which is distant in space or time gains enchantment and enlargement from the imagination, which is the faculty most employed in this sphere. Australians credit to their ancestors deeds to themselves impossible, though they are themselves their ancestors reincarnate.[8] The greed and liking for possessions which existed on earth are attributed in some parts to the spirit, and among the Bakongo, for instance, this desire is satisfied by placing all the deceased's wealth about the grave.[9] The soul's assumed mobility,
[6. Neuhass, Deutsch Neu-Guinea, iii. 142 ff.
7. Roscoe, Baganda, pp. 282 ff.
8. Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes, pp. 489 ff
9. Weeks, Primitive Bakongo, p. 278.]
such as was displayed in its power to leave the body during life and to make investigations at even a considerable distance, is not lost but rather enhanced. It has become a free agent, no longer bound by the body's necessities and limitations of locomotion, at liberty to roam unfettered, to use in the wide universe its powers--those that remain or are acquired in its new condition. If it in earthly life could leave the body temporarily and like the lightning speed hither and thither, now, disfleshed, its mobility has gained by the change.
Especially is it believed that spirits acquire a larger knowledge. Not only do they gain a completer survey of the past and the present, but a knowledge of the future becomes theirs. According as their dispositions prompt, they become helpers of their survivors or hostilely active against them.
Particularly interesting in this connection is the relationship of the ghost and other beings to warning and prediction. Among the powers of the soul is that of return and manifestation to survivors. Melanesian, Andaman, and African ghosts, for instance, reappear to and converse with their people and become a medium of information.[10] Particularly through dreams do they mediate--a performance recorded in antiquity and attested by present day belief over a large area.[11] Indeed, it is through the dream that approach to human comprehension is most easily made by divine, superhuman, or discarnate powers, the spirit in this condition being loosed from fleshly trammels. The human spirit in sleep is regarded as not bound by quite the same inflexible laws to the bodily limitations. The employment of the dream as a means of information or warning at once occurs to the reader--Jacob, Joseph, Pharaoh, Nebucbadrezzar; clasctical cases will be found in Pindar, Olympiacs, XIII, 105 and Pausanias, X, xxxiii, II. It will be remembered that in an earlier section the importance of the dream as an index to animistic thought was dwelt upon at some length. One specimen of developed classical and philosophical thought on this has been summarized from Jamblichus.
[10. Seligmann, Melanesians, pp. 190 ff.; Klosts, In the Andamans, p. 296; Weeks, Congo Cannibals, pp. 264-265.
11. Herodotus, IV, 172; Pomponius Mela, I. viii. 8; Mauss, Origines des pouvoirs magiques, p. 15; Haddon, Anthropological Essays, p. 179.]
"There is nothing unworthy of belief in what you have been told concerning sleep and the meaning of dreams. I will explain it thus. The soul has a twofold life, a lower and a higher. In sleep the soul is released from the constraint of the body, and enters as one emancipated on its divine life of intelligence. Then as the noble faculty which beholds the objects that truly are, the objects in the world of intelligence, stirs within and awakens to its power, who can be surprised that the mind, which contains within itself the principles of all that happens, should in this, the state of liberation, discern the future in those antecedent principles which will make that future what it is to be? The nobler part of the soul is thus united by abstraction to higher natures, and becomes a participant in the wisdom and foreknowledge of the gods. Recorded examples of this are numerous and well authenticated; instances too occur every day. Numbers of sick by sleeping had their cure revealed to them in dreams. Would not Alexander's army have perished but for a dream in which Dionysius pointed out the means of safety? Was not the siege of Aphritis raised through a dream sent by Jupiter Ammon to Lysander? 'The night time of the body is the daytime of the soul.'"[12]
The student of anthropology will at once recognize here the advanced justification for beliefs which go back very far for their origins. But even in the advanced stage of thought represented by Jamblichus there are present elements that are duplicable today in the most primitive regions.
Several doors open here to alluring bypaths--to inspiration, prediction, oracles, on the one side, these presuming a favoring: disposition on the part of the ghost; and, on the other, to necromancy and the "black art" or black magic, if the ghost or his control be evil. Melanesians and Africans say that the soul may return to seize and inspire the unconscious shaman or prophet to pregnant utterance.[13] We have said "unconscious"--for it seems practically established that, in the earlier stages of culture, prediction and the delivery of the oracle took place only when the medium was in ecstasy. Vergil's description of the
[12. Theurgia or the Egyptian Mysteries, Part III, chap. vii.
13. Codrington, Melanesians, pp. 218 ff.; Roscue, Baganda, p. 113.]
raging sybil will recur to the classical student.[14] Plato says that "inspired and true divination is not attained to by anyone in his full senses, but only when the power of thought is fettered by sleep or disease, or some paroxysm of frenzy."[15] It is well known that the American Indians regarded the simple or mentally incompetent as peculiarly endowed and in closer touch with the supernatural than those possessed of all their mental powers. In the Old Testament there is an unconscious testimony to the veracity of many parts of the narrative, guaranteed by psychological conclusions, in the fact that the earlier phases of prophecy and prediction are described as involving the ecstatic state or a condition of unconsciousness. Such are the use of the dream, the case of Balaam, the prophets among whom Saul found himself, this form of affection being communicable or "catching"--compare the "dancing mania" of the middle ages-and Elisha, for whom music was in at least one case a prerequisite to the delivery of the oracle--the "hand of the Lord " (2 Kings 3:15) being the Old Testament expression for the modern psychological term
[14. Æneid, V1, 45 ff., 77ff.
15. Timæus, 71.]
"ecstasy" adopted from the Greek. So among perhaps most primitive peoples, like the Melanesians and Africans referred to above, warnings from the supernatural and even knowledge of other matters, as of charms, are supposed to be received under such conditions.[16]
Ghosts do not figure merely as indicators of coming events or as guardians against evil fortune. Their larger capacity for action may make them powerful intercessors with still higher supernatural beings or spirits, through shamans who control them or know them intimately.[17] Or their own success in their earthly vocation makes them interested in survivors who follow their trade. In Africa the spirit of a dead hunter is powerful to help in the chase, and is propitiated to that end.[18] In Melanesia the help of ghosts in securing the right kind of weather, in performing feats of healing, in success with the fishing net or line, and in agriculture is obtained by sacrifices
[16. So the Australians: Howitt, Native Tribes, pp. 435-437. On the facts at large of Carpenter, Comparative Religion, pp. 181, 182.
17. Carruthers, Unknown Mongolia, i. 243.
18. Weeks, Primitive Bakongo, pp. 181-183.]
and offerings.[19] Indeed, from the inhabitants of Ghosttown may come some of the good gifts, agricultural, for instance, which make life worth living.[20] The spirits of the dead may keep a watchful eye upon survivors, preventing or punishing infractions of tribal customs that involve offence to themselves, and warning against repetition by inflicting sickness or failure in various enterprises.[21] Foundation sacrifice had the purpose of procuring for the structure the protection of the spirits of the dead.[22]
On the other hand, ghosts may be among the spirits whose malevolence needs to be guarded against. In fact, among the post mortem transformations may be that into ill disposed spirits. Usually, when this is conceived to be the case, the cause is found in some misfortune in life or death. Among the Ibo, for instance, a childless woman, a wifeless or moneyless man, or a suicide may as ghosts attempt to increase the population
[19. Codrington, Melanesians, pp. 132. ff.: Lambert, Mœurs et superstitions, pp. 24, 26, 218, 224 ff., 293 ff.; Turner, Samoa, pp. 345 ff.
20. Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, pp. 238-239.
21. Seligmann, Melanesians, pp. 192, 310.
22, B. D. Eerdmans, in Expositor, Nov. 1913, p. 197.]
of the underworld by attacks upon those left on earth.[23] Similarly in New Guinea those who die in childbirth, suicides, and those who have lost their heads become maleficent.[24] The Omahas hold that ghosts of the murdered return and inflict punishment by disease, or by causing the wind to blow from hunter to game and so to spoil his sport.[25] Among Congo cannibals the soul seen in dreams is a wandering human spirit aiming at evil in its travels, and the witch doctor may be hired to kill it. The nostrils of the dead are plugged immediately after death to keep the spirit in the body as long as possible.[26] If the ghost is for any reason unwelcome in the nether world and is driven out, it becomes malicious and aims at mischief, either inflicting positive ills by sending storms and like disasters or preventing success in various pursuits.[27] In some cases ghosts are normally neutral, and their disposition and consequent actions depend upon the treatment they receive from
[23. Thomas, Anthropological Report, p. 312
24. Frazer, Belief in Immortality, i. 212.
25. Fletcher and La Flesche, 27th Report, p. 212.
26. Weeks, Congo Cannibals, p. 263-264, 269.]
the living.[28] So that the well-being of survivors depends on propitiation by gifts and ceremonies or on manifestations of abiding affection.[29] The duties of classic Greeks and Romans to their dead--careful and honorable burial, celebration by games at the funeral or on anniversaries--recur at once to the mind: and in these and other matters these peoples handed down in memory at least and often in ritual the doings and beliefs of far away ancestors. Close parallels to classic customs have been observed among African, Melanesian, and Polynesian peoples, where not only is the funeral offering placed on the ground, but dramatic performances in honor of the dead take place.[30] Among some races, such as British New Guineans and the Mafulu, ghosts are always malevolent.[31]
Among the exercises of the enlarged powers
[28. Williamson, South Sea Savage, pp. 65, 68, 74, 75, 76, 81 ff.; Roscoe, Baganda, pp. 116, 278, 286.
29. Taplin, Narrinyeri, p. 19; Curt, Australian Race, i. 87; Howitt, Native Tribes, pp. 461, 463, 473; Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes, p. 507, and Native Tribes, p. 511.
30. Talbot, In the Shadow of The Bush, p. 18; Brown, Melanesians and Polynesians, pp. 214 ff.; Milligan, Fetish Folk, pp. 233-236.
31. Williamson, South Sea Savage, p. 281 and Mafulu Mountain People, pp. 243 ff., 266 ff., 297 ff.; JAI, xxviii (1899), 216 ff.]
attributed to ghosts by quite diverse peoples is one which, as we shall see later, they possess in common with non-human spirits. This is the infliction of disease in an access of malignancy. Such a belief is held by American Indians, South Sea islanders, Hindus, New Guineans, and many others.[32] They may inflict lockjaw by a blow, cause death, induce phthisis, and bring pestilence.[33] Shamans and medicine men may use them to secure revenge or haunt the living; and this again calls up the need for exorcism.[34] This gives rise to various devices and taboos, aiming at propitiating or deceiving the ghosts, such as change of names assigned to things belonging to the dead, or dropping out of the language words which contained the name borne in life, this going so far in some cases as to involve the destruction of huts, plantations, trees, and other possessions." It is quite in keeping with the
[32. Folk-lore, ii. 420 ff., 431; Kloss, In the Andamans, p. 305; Declé, Three years in Savage Africa, pp. 236, 344.
33. Talbot, In the Shadow of The Bush, p. 230; Weeks, Congo Cannibals, p. 266; Roscoe, Baganda, p. 100; Williamson, South Sea Savage, pp. 81 ff.; Crooke, Tribes and Caste, iii. 436.
34. Williamson, South Sea Savage, pp. 81 ff.; Roscoe, Baganda, p. 126.
35. Seligmann, Melanesians, pp. 631 ff.; Cambridge Anthropological Expedition, v. 250.]
whole conception of things that ghosts should be especially dangerous at night.[36]
From all this, to anticipate slightly what is yet to come, fear of discarnate spirits may lead to a cult, a worship, which is apotropaic, deprecatory, or propitiatory in character. On the other hand, the sense of favors received or to come gives the rationale of a cultus which embodies more of gratitude and pleasure than of fear. With both these varieties of mental qualities attributed to ghosts, shared by them in common with non-human powers, it seems to require somewhat of ingenuity and a miscalculation or misappreciation of native human traits to force one to derive all worship from fear.[37] Timor fecit deos is now hardly tenable in its original sense, in view of abundance of ascertained fads. Most of the animals, especially those domesticated, display amiable traits, including gratitude. We can hardly hold, therefore, that man, whether the product of evolution or of special creation, developed one of his noblest exercises, that of worship, from a sense of fear alone.
[36. Neuhass, Deutsch Neu-Guinea, iii. 64, 147.
37. Chalmers and Gill, Work and Adventure, pp. 84 ff.]
WE have seen that to the discarnate spirit is attributed much of fondness for things to which it had become accustomed in its earthly life. The idea of preference or liking comes out frequently in connection with its post-mortem habitat. Of course, it is to be remembered that the eschatology of primitive peoples is vague and by no means consistent. Indeed, when it is recalled that Christian eschatology is still in a confused state, when orthodox theologians are at odds as to the location of the soul between death and the judgment, even as to the time of the judgment, whether immediately after death or at some indefinitely distant time; when these doctors of the faith disagree as to the conscious existence or the "sleep" of the soul after death, as to its removal to heaven or hell on dissolution, and whether that heaven or hell is final or, only temporary--one can hardly expect primitive peoples, whose memory for history is short and their outlook and forecast vague and brief, to have a consecutive and sharply defined eschatology. Consequently we find variations innumerable in the conceptions of the soul's location, and a sort of warfare between the poor ghost's supposed preference and the desires of survivors.
It is quite normal that the spirit is credited with lingering affection for the home and the environment that so long harbored it, and makes the grave, which is, of course, in the immediate neighborhood, its favorite haunt and the body in the grave still its home. How persistent this primitive notion is may be verified in almost any rural community, where few indeed care to pass God's acre after dark without company. The prehistoric Mycenæans left in graves a groove by which evidently to pour the offerings to the ghosts; Egyptian tombs had channels by which ka or ba could have access to and egress from the embalmed body. Even in Mongolia these apertures are found in the graves, though there they are placed at the sides, showing that they were intended for the spirit's exit and entrance and not to facilitate the placing of provisions--food and drink.[1] Many primitive peoples entertain beliefs parallel to those indicated by these customs. Such are African tribes like the Baganda, certain Australians, and many others.[2] From this conception may arise the thought that souls wander around their old haunts and even make them impossible for dwellings, at least for a time; or they may frequent places having peculiar topographical features, where their clans foregather.[3] Sometimes this return is only temporary, limited to certain hours of the night, as for example, the case of some African ghosts, who are released between twelve and three in the morning--remember the ghost of Hamlet's father![4] In other cases there is alleged to be a time when the ghosts must quit finally their earthly haunts for a permanent abode elsewhere. Thus in New Guinea[5] it seems that the spirit does not find its way at once to its home; but wanders for some
[1. NGM, May 1913, p. 65.
2. Roscoe, The Baganda, pp. 282 ff.; Howitt, Native Tribes S. E. Australia, pp. 434, 458-439, 455, 470; Talbot, In The Shadow of the Bush, p. 232.
3 Taplin, Narrinyeri, pp. 181 ff.; Thomas, Report, p. 38; Williamson, South Sea Savage, p. 76; Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes, pp. 123, 126.
4 Talbot, In The Shadow of the Bush, p. 232.]
time about the places it was familiar with during the period it was connected with the body. It may be possible that the spirit does not finally leave its own haunts until the death feasts are finished, or at least that the people believe the spirit may be about, and likely to injure them, until they think a sufficient time has elapsed, and a sufficient number of death feasts have been held, and that then it is safe to close the series, to remove the tabu, and to give over the mourning."[5]
There is, however, in this conception left open the possibility of securing a brief visit from them for purposes that are supposed to serve the living. How easily out of this could develop the idea and practice of necromancy!
On the other hand one may support with abundant evidence the thesis that there is a quite general consensus to the effect that it is unseemly for departed spirits to inhabit the land where the living pass their earthly existence. It is widely believed that ghosts have their own land whither living mortals may not go, whence, also, spirits may not
[1. Newton, In Far New Guinea, p. 220; cf Neuhass, Deutsch Neu-Guinea, iii. 149 ff.]
usually return, unless under highly exceptional circumstances. Still it must not be forgotten that a whole group of festivals and a host of folk customs, centering in mid-winter for the most part, have as their basis the idea that ghosts return annually and must be treated with respect, kindness, and hospitality. All Souls' Day is the survival in Christian custom of this belief.[6]
To the questions where and what the region of the dead is many tribes give various answers. Naturally man's wildest flights of imagination and fancy have played with this theme. Of course, much depends, in the answer that is given by any particular group of peoples, upon the geography of the region and the cosmography of the group. It is most natural, from the usual custom of burial, that a region beneath the earth should be in the thoughts of very diverse tribes and nations. There was placed the Babylonian "Land-of-no-Return," for the most part the Egyptian home of the dead, the Greek Hades, the resting place of natives of Hood Peninsula and other places in New Guinea, in Oceanica
[6. For convenient collections of cases, cf. Harrison, Prolegomena, passim, and Miles, Christmas, iii. pp. 161 ff.]
(Samoa)--to name only a few representative peoples.[7] On the other hand, it frequently happens that the place of souls is otherwise located: on a distant mountain, as with some natives of British New Guinea;[8] or where the sun sets (compare Egyptian ideas); or on an island far away;[9] or under the sea;[10] or in the heavens, either in some defintitely designated luminary or in some indefinite locality (Omahas regard the Milky Way as the path to this home by which spirits pass in turn to and through seven spirit worlds).[11] At times the information is quite definite, as for example in parts of New Guinea.
"About Wedau and Wamira the spirits of the dead go eventually to some place to the eastward of Cape Frere, in a valley in the mountains called Iola, the approach to the abode of the spirits being through a hole in the ground. When the spirit arrives it is questioned at once, 'Where have you come
[7. JAI, xxviii (1899), 216 ff.; Neuhass, Deutsch Neu-Guinea, iii. 149 ff.; Westervelt, Legends of Maui, p. 129.
8. Seligmann, Melanesians, p. 192.
9. Westervelt, Legends of Maui, pp. 129 ff.; Codrington, Melanesians, pp. 255 ff.; Frazer, Immortality, p. 192.
10. Lambert, Mœurs et superstitions, pp. 13 ff.; Seligmann, Melanesians, pp. 655 ff.; Turner, Samoa, pp. 257-258.
11. Fletcher and La Flesche, 27th Report, etc., pp. 588-589.]
from?' 'What have you come for?' just as every time you go into a village every one you meet asks you, 'Where are you going?' 'What are you after?' The newly arrived one says, 'I have come from Wedau'or 'Wamira,' as the case may be, or the answer may state more explicitly the section of the village, and 'Where else should I go except to my own people?' Then the question is asked, 'Who sent you?' and for answer the name of some sorcerer or witch is given, the one responsible for the death. The spirit is admitted to its new home, where it finds feasting and dancing, plenty of food, and apparently also some fighting, and should the spirit be killed, as some seem to think possible, during such fighting, then it is the end, there is no more life of such."[12]
It would be expected that ideas differ greatly as to the character of the spirit world. A wide group of unrelated peoples have looked on the place of the soul as melancholy and mournful, fitting the soul's unsubstantial character. The saying of Hezekiah, king of Israel, after he had recovered from a dangerous illness, here leaps into the mind:
[12. Newton, In Far New Guinea, p.219.]
"For the grave cannot praise thee, death cannot celebrate thee:
They that go down into the pit cannot hope for thy truth.
The living, the living, he shall praise thee, As I do this day."[13]
Such were the conceptions of Babylonians, Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans. A noted Greek hero is made to declare that he would rather be a lowly laborer on earth than have an exalted station among the dead. Adversely to this, not a few peoples patterned their ideas of future life on the present world. Such is the content of the notion in cases already cited[14] where primitive tribes mutilated foes to prevent the shades from taking revenge in the other world. And in many other instances the imagination has compassed only similar conceptions.[15] The Thay of Indo-China look on the next life as the counterpart of this.[16] The African Bakongo bury their dead late in the day so that the spirits may
[13. Isa. 38:18-19.
14. Above, pp. 166 ff.
15 Lambert, Mœurs et superstitions, pp. 13 ff.; Seligmann, Melanesians, pp. 65S ff.; Gomes, Sea Dyaks of Borneo, p. 208.
16. Anthropos, ii (1907), 619.]
arrive when the ghosts who preceded the present dead are home from their labor in the fields and may welcome the newcomer.[17] Other Africans know of ghost towns where the dead live and congregate as they did while on earth.[18] The Hausa ghosts have a city of their own, which has at least once been seen by a man who returned to tell the tale. A traveler saw four caravans crossing the desert in different directions, and followed one which seemed to him best. Suddenly he saw the ghost city in front of him, and in some way became cognizant of its nature. He hurriedly turned about and escaped. This was almost miraculous, for the spirits summon travelers from a caravan, and he who follows them to the ghost city never returns.[19] The ancient Egyptians conceived the land of the departed and their life as duplicating under happier conditions life on the Nile; indeed there was a celestial Nile land, where the social conditions which environed life on earth continued, even to the institution of slavery and subjection of the peasant to the noble. And exactly on a par with this state of expectation
[17. Weeks, Primitive Bakongo, p. 270.
18. Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, passim.
19. Tremearne, Ban of The Bori, pp. 155-156.]
is the set of ideas regarding the "other side" entertained by South Sea people.[20] The custom in old Egypt, Japan, and elsewhere, and in modern Africa, of slaughtering wives, servants, slaves, and cattle to provide a retinue and a living for the dead in the spirit world is too well known to need substantiation here. We have already had before us[21] the curious custom of providing Ushabtiu in Egypt, and have seen the record of the institution of a similar custom in Japan, while the explanation given in China and Korea of the figures around the grave-mounds in those countries has also been cited. We have to remember in taking note of these customs in the Far East that the practice of magic there has for ages been almost as common and as inveterate as in Egypt.
We may further note that in parts of Fiji and New Guinea the souls of the departed are supposed to dwell in a great community, and the puberty ceremonies are by some construed as having reference to introduction to ancestral spirits in preparation for final union with them.[22]
[20. Williamson, South Sea Savage, p. 75.
21. Above, pp. 130 ff.
22. Frazer, Belief in Immortality, i. 434.]
In some regions the golden age of man is placed beyond the grave. Some British New Guinea tribes think of the future life as a paradise, with no old age, sickness, crime, fighting, death, or evil spirits; where first marriages are reëstablished and children are born who reach maturity and maintain that condition with unabated strength and virility; and so it is with other South Sea islanders.[23]
The means of approach to this final abode varies, of course, with the grade of civilization, the location of the soul's home, and many other circumstances usually dependent on local conditions. If the home is on an island or across a river, a ferry may be conceived--thus Melanesians reproduce in part the ideas of the Greeks with their Charon and the Styx.[24] Others conceive the entrance to be through well-known caves or holes, and exploration of these by the reckless or foolhardy is discouraged by the belief that attempts at entrance will be punished by severe earthquakes.[25] Or a chasm is believed to separate
[23. Brown, Melanesians and Polynesians, pp. 443 ff.; Frazer, Belief in Immortality, i. 192; Seligmann, Melanesians, p. 192.
24. Codrington, Melanesians, pp. 255 ff.
25. Newton, In Far New Guinea, p. 219; Turner, Samoa, pp. 257-258.]
the two worlds, spanned by a tree trunk, as among American Indians or some Melanesians (the latter must carry the figure of a frigate bird to ensure safe passage),[26] or with a higher development of culture the tree trunk becomes a bridge, the chasm hell, and the passage the trial of the soul.
While by far the preponderating belief among primitive peoples is that the dead, especially their ghosts, are to be gotten out of the way, and while the general feeling is one of fear, in occasional situations an enduring connection with them is desired, and especial efforts are made to bring this about. Thus some peoples in Africa, where nearly all shades of primitive thought may be discovered, are so anxious to secure this abiding presence of their dead that they cut off the head of the deceased and preserve it in the home. This is thought to secure the continuance of the presence of the favor of the dead patron, as he now becomes by this means."
[26. Codrington, Melanesians, p. 257
27. Frobenius, Voice of Africa, p. 674.]
THE notion of the underworld as a prison place in which the dead are confined has given rise in many different centers to the thought of some daring mortal who breaks the law separating the two worlds, and visits the home of the dead, winning through by power of love, or sheer bravado and physical might or challenge, or by favor of the gods. The Descensus Averni is a widespread myth. Its earliest literary form meets us in pre-Semitic Babylonia in the story of Tammuz and Ishtar--now so well known that no extended narrative is here necessary.[1] A fairly close parallel to the Ishtar episode is found in far-away Japan, where the goddess Izanami died and her spouse Izanagi descended after her, broke the taboo concerning preservation of darkness (which is an element in so many cycles of folklore unconnected with the Descensus),
[1. For the story, see most conveniently Rogers, Cuneiform Parallels, pp. 121-131.]
and with difficulty escaped to the upper air, pursued by the revengeful goddess and her minions.[2] The retirement of the love-goddess Ishtar in Babylonia to the underworld is also paralleled by that of the sun-goddess in Japan, though it is "the rock-cave of heaven" in which the latter hides herself, and so brings darkness, as the absence of Ishtar brings lack of desire, on earth.[3] Hercules' famous exploit of descending and baling Cerberus, the snake-haired dog guardian of the shades who would fain return, to the upper air is in keeping with the hero's hardy and daring nature. The Babylonians having conceived so early the notion, it is not to be wondered at that the Mandaeans, who took over so much of Babylonian custom and mythology, should take over in the descensus Averni the exploit of Manda-da hayye.[4] Of course the Vergilian story of Æneas' descent at once recurs to the mind, as well as that of Vergil's imitator and disciple Dante.
But the idea is not confined to peoples so far along in culture. Maui, the culture hero of New Zealand and the South Sea, made the dread journey to meet his great ancestress -
[2. Aston, Shinto, p. 93.
3 Ib., p. 100.
4. NSH., vii. 147.]
the lure here was merely material, a fish hook and to get fire.[5] The Etoi, a people of Africa, know of the same venturous enterprise with the taboo of eating ghost food, which connects the story in thought, though hardly in origin, with the Greek myth of the ravished Persephone, and with a story of quite different purport in Babylonia.[6] Among some New Guinean peoples there are chosen mortals that make the journey and return in safety.[7] Omaha Indians regard it as possible for the living, in a swoon, to visit the dread regions of the dead and return unscathed.[8] But these are the exceptions, and only heroes and gods, and even they under specially favoring auspices, like the command, behest, or permission of the chief god, visit the dead and are able to reascend from "The Land of No-Return."
[6. Westervelt, Legends of Maui, pp. 23, 48, 68 ff.
7. Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush, pp. 240, 336.
7. Seligmann, Melanesians, pp. 655 ff.
8. Fletcher and La Flesche, 27th Report, etc., p. 589.]
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