erected, and the ashes of the deceased were enclosed in a pot over which a small kistvaen was erected.
With the burning of the dead the old belief in the bodies of the departed walking, requiring food, sucking blood, claiming brides, suffered eclipse, only to return full again with Christianity, when bodies were once more interred.
With incineration, the ghost took the place of the restless body.
The change from burying the body to burning it was due to a revolt of the living against the tyranny and exactions of the dead. The dead having been treated very handsomely, made themselves, as Devonshire people would put it, ‘proper nuisances.’ They meddled in private affairs, would have the best cut off the joint, and the last bit of fashionable finery; they insisted on being periodically visited, their bones scraped, and their skulls polished. Falling into a morbid condition of mind, men were continually seeing phantoms in sleep and awake—to such an extent that those who were in this condition could not distinguish between what they had dreamt and what they had actually seen. A modern observer’s description of the state of mind of the negroes of South
