Page images
PDF
EPUB

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. 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.2 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. 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 1 Cranz, 'Grönland,' p. 259.

2 Williams, 'Fiji,' vol. i. p. 244. See 'Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. iii. p. 113 (Dayaks). Compare wasting and death of souls in depths of Hades, Taylor, 'New Zealand,' p. 232.

3 Bosman, 'Guinea' in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 401. See also Waitz, 'Anthropologie,' vol. ii. p. 191 (W. Afr.); Callaway, 'Rel. of Amazulu,' p. 355.

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.1 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

1 Cavazzi, 'Congo, Matamba, et Angola,' lib. i. p. 270. See also Liebrecht in Zeitschr. für Ethnologie,' vol. v. p. 96 (Tartary, Scandinavia, Greece).

[ocr errors]

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 huntinggrounds 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;1 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

1 Schoolcraft, 'Indian Tribes,' part i. p. 310; Bastian, ‘Psychologie,' pp. 111, 193; Doolittle, 'Chinese,' vol. i. p. 235.

appears that the place is simply abandoned to the ghost. In Old Calabar it was customary for the son to leave his father's house to decay, but after two years he might rebuild it, the ghost being thought by that time to have departed; the Hottentots abandoned the dead man's house, and were said to avoid entering it lest the ghost should be within; the Yakuts let the hut fall in ruins where any one had expired, thinking it the habitation of demons; the Karens were said to destroy their villages to escape the dangerous neighbourhood of departed souls.* 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!' ie., 'there is nothing more to be had here!'; the Hottentots removed the dead from the hut by an opening broken out on purpose, to prevent him from finding the way back; 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; in Russia the Chuwashes fling a red-hot stone

5

6

1 Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 323.

2 Kolben, p. 579.

3 Billings, p. 125.

4 Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien.' vol. i. p. 145; Cross, 1.c., p. 311. For other cases of desertion of dwellings after a death, possibly for the same motive, see Bourien, 'Tribes of Malay Pen.' in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iii. p. 82; Polack, 'M. of New Zealanders,' vol. i. pp. 204, 216; Steller, Kamtschatka,' p. 271. But the Todas say that the buffaloes slaughtered and the hut burnt at the funeral are transferred to the spirit of the deceased in the next world; Shortt in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. vii. p. 247. See Waitz, vol. iii. p. 199. 5 Egede, 'Greenland,' p. 152; Cranz, p. 300.

6 Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 323; see pp. 329, 363.

7 Bowring, 'Siam,' vol. i. p. 122; Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien.' vol. iii. p. 258.

1

after the corpse is carried out, for an obstacle to bar the soul from coming back; 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.2 In the ancient and mediaval 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

1 Castrén, 'Finn. Myth.' p. 120.

* Wuttke, 'Volksaberglaube,' pp. 213-17. Other cases of taking out the dead by a gap made on purpose: Arbousset and Daumas, p. 502 (Bushmen); Magyar, p. 351 (Kimbunda); Moffat, p. 307 (Bechuanas); Waitz, vol. iii. p. 199 (Ojibwas);—their motive is probably that the ghost may not find its way back by the door.

« PreviousContinue »