Primitive Culture/Chapter 12

by Edward Burnett Tylor

 

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, misshaped, 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.
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

1 Kaufmann, 'Schilderungen aus Centralafrika,' p. 124; G. Lejean in 'Rev. des Deux Mondes,' Apr. 1, 1860, p. 760; see Brun-Rollet, 'Nil Blanc,' pp. 100, 234. A dialogue by the missionary Beltrame (1859-60), in Mitterutzner, 'Dinka-Sprache,' p. 57, ascribes to the Dinkas ideas of heaven and hell, which, however, show Christian influence. 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 denned 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! Page:Primitive Culture Vol 2.djvu/47 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.^[85] 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, (Greek characters), as Lucian says.^[86] 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.^[87] In the classic world such rites were represented by funeral feasts and oblations of food.^[88]

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,'^[89] 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.^[90] Spaniards still offer bread and wine on the tombs of those they love, on the anniversary of their decease.^[91] 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.'^[92]

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.^[93] The Karens make their annual offerings to the dead in the 'month of shades,' that is, December;^[94] the Kocch of North Bengal every year at harvest-home offer fruits and a fowl to deceased parents;^[95] 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;^[96] in West Africa we hear of the feast of the dead at the time of yam-harvest;^[97] at the end of the year the Haitian negroes take food to the graves for the shades to eat, 'manger zombi,' as they say.^[98] The Roman Feralia and Lemuralia were held in February and May.^[99] 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.^[100] 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!'^[101] When Odilo, Abbot of Cluny, at the end of the tenth century, instituted the celebration of All Souls' Day (November 2),^[102] 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 bare-headed 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.^[103]

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.^[104] 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.^[105] 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.^[106] 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.^[107] 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.^[108] 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.^[109] 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!'^[110] 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.^[111] 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.^[112] 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.^[113] 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.^[114]

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 decs.
Tegula porrectis satis est velata coronis,
Et sparsae fruges, parcaque mica salis,
Inque mero mollita ceres, violaeque solutae:
Haec habeat media testa relicta via.
Nee majora veto. Sed et his placabilis umbra est.'^[115]

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.^[116] 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.'^[117]

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.

1. Brebeuf in 'Rel. des Jés. dans la Nouvelle France,' 1636, p. 130; Charlevoix, 'Nouvelle France,' vol. vi. p. 75. See Brinton, p. 253.
2. Waitz, vol. iii. p. 195, see p. 213. Morse, 'Report on Indian Affairs,' p. 345.
3. Mayne, 'British Columbia,' p. 181.
4. Cranz, 'Grönland,' pp. 248, 258, see p. 212. See also Turner, 'Polynesia.' p. 353; Meiners, vol. ii. p. 793.
5. Bastian, 'Psychologie,' p. 28.
6. Bastian, 'Zur vergl. Psychologie,' in Lazarus and Steinthal's 'Zeitschrift,' vol. v. p. 160, &c., also Papuas and other races.
7. Burton, 'W. & W. fr. W. Afr.' p. 376.
8. Krapf, 'E. Afr.' p. 201.
9. J. L. Wilson, 'W. Afr.' p. 210; see also R. Clarke, 'Sierra Leone,' p. 159.
10. Bastian, l. c.
11. Macpherson, p. 72; also Tickell in 'Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,' vol. ix. pp. 793, &c.; Dalton in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. vi. p. 22 (similar rite of Mundas and Oraons).
12. Klemm, 'C. G.' vol. iii. p 77; K. Leems, 'Lapper,' c. xiv.
13. R. Taylor, 'New Zealand,' p. 284; see Shortland, 'Traditions,' p. 145; Turner, 'Polynesia,' p. 353; Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 279; see also p. 276 (Samoyeds). Compare Charlevoix, 'Nouvelle France,' vol. v. p. 426; Steller, 'Kamtschatka,' p. 353; Kracheninnikow, ii. 117. See Plath, 'Rel. der alten Chinesen,' ii. p. 98.
14. Grey, 'Australia,' vol. i. p. 301, vol. ii. p. 363 [native's accusation against some foreign sailors who had assaulted him, 'djanga Taal-wurt kyle-gut bomb-gur,'—'one of the dead struck Taal-wurt under the ear,' &c. The word djanga=the dead, the spirits of deceased persons (see Grey, 'Vocab. of S. W. Australia'), had come to be the usual term for a European]. Lang, 'Queensland,' pp. 34, 336; Bonwick, 'Tasmanians,' p. 183; Scherzer, 'Voy. of Novara,' vol. iii. p. 34; Bastian, 'Psychologie,' p. 222, 'Mensch,' vol. iii. pp. 362-3, and in Lazarus and Steinthal's 'Zeitschrift,' l. c.; Turner, 'Polynesia,' p. 424.
15. Römer, 'Guinea,' p. 85; Brun-Rollet, 'Nil Blanc,' &c. p. 234.
16. Sproat, 'Savage Life,' ch. xviii., xix., xxi. Souls of the dead appear in dreams, either in human or animal forms, p. 174. See also Brinton, p. 145.
17. Schoolcraft, 'Indian Tribes,' part iii. p. 113.
18. Hayes, 'Arctic Boat Journey,' p. 198.
19. Brinton, 'Myths of New World,' p. 102.
20. Brebeuf in 'Rel. des Jés.' 1636, p. 104.
21. Morgan, 'Iroquois,' p. 174.
22. Clavigero, 'Messico,' vol. ii. p. 5.
23. Martius, 'Ethnog. Amer.' vol. i. p. 602; Markham in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iii. p. 195.
24. Dobrizhoffer, 'Abipones,' vol. ii. pp. 74, 270.
25. Coreal in Brinton, l. c. See also J. G. Müller, pp. 139 (Natchez), 223 (Caribs), 402 (Peru).
26. Chomé in 'Lettres Edif.' vol. viii.; see also Martius, vol. i. p. 446.
27. Waitz, vol. ii. p. 419 (Maravi).
28. Callaway, 'Rel. of Amazulu,' p. 196, &c.; Arbousset and Daumas, p. 237.
29. J. L. Wilson, 'W. Afr.' pp. 210, 218. See also Brun-Rollet, pp. 200, 234; Meiners, vol. i. p. 211.
30. Steinhauser in 'Mag. der Evang. Miss.' Basel, 1856, No. 2, p. 135.
31. Manu, xi. xii. Ward, 'Hindoos,' vol. i. p. 164, vol. ii. pp. 215, 347-52.
32. St. John, 'Far East,' vol. i. p. 181; Perelaer, 'Ethnog. Beschr. der Dajaks,' p. 17.
33. Hunter, 'Rural Bengal,' p. 210. See also Shaw in 'As. Res.' vol. iv. p. 46 (Rajmahal tribes).
34. Abraham Roger, 'La Porte Ouverte,' Amst. 1670, p. 107.
35. Manu, xii. 9: 'c̣arîrajaih karmmadoshaih yâti sthâvaratâm narah'—'for crimes done in the body, the man goes to the inert (motionless) state;' xii. 42, 'sthâvarâh krimakîtac̣cha matsyâh sarpâh sakachhapâh pac̣avac̣cha mrigaschaiva jaghanyâ tâmasî gatih'—'inert (motionless) things, worms and insects, fish, serpents, tortoises and beasts and deer also are the last dark form.'
36. Köppen, 'Religion des Buddha,' vol. i. pp. 35, 289, &c., 318; Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire, 'Le Bouddha et sa Religion,' p. 122; Hardy, 'Manual of Budhism,' pp. 98, &c., 180, 318, 445, &c.
37. Herod, ii. 123, see Rawlinson's Tr.; Plutarch. De Iside 31, 72; Wilkinson, 'Ancient Eg.' vol. ii. ch. xvi.
38. Plat. Phædo, Timæus, Phædrus, Repub.; Diog. Laert. Empedokles xii.; Pindar. Olymp. ii. antistr. 4; Ovid. Metam. xv. 160; Lucian. Somn. 17, &c. Philostr. Vit. Apollon. Tyan. See also Meyer's Conversations-Lexicon, art. 'Seelenwanderung.' For re-birth in old Scandinavia, see Helgakvidha, iii., in 'Edda.'
39. Eisenmenger, part ii. p. 23, &c.
40. Beausobre, 'Hist, de Manichée,' &c., vol. i. pp. 245-6, vol. ii. pp. 496-9; G. Flügel, 'Mani.' See Augustin. Contra Faust.; De Hæres.; De Quantitate Animæ.
41. Gul. de Rubruquis in 'Rec. des Voy. Soc. de Géographie de Paris,' vol. iv. p. 356. Benjamin of Tudela, ed. and tr. by Asher, Hebrew 22, Eng. p. 62. Niebuhr, 'Reisebeschr. nach Arabien,' &c., vol. ii. pp. 438-443; Meiners, vol. ii. p. 796.
42. St. Clair and Brophy, 'Bulgaria,' p. 57. Compare the tenets of the Russian sect of Dukhobortzi, in Haxthausen, 'Russian Empire,' vol. i. p. 288, &c.
43. 2 Since the first publication of the above remark, M. Louis Figuier has supplied a perfect modern instance by his book, entitled 'Le Lendemain de la Mort,' translated into English as 'The Day after Death: Our Future Life according to Science.' His attempt to revive the ancient belief, and to connect it with the evolution-theory of modern naturalists, is carried out with more than Buddhist elaborateness. Body is the habitat of soul, which goes out when a man dies, as one forsakes a burning house. In the course of development, a soul may migrate through bodies stage after stage, zoophyte and oyster, grasshopper and eagle, crocodile and dog, till it arrives at man, thence ascending to become one of the superhuman beings or angels who dwell in the planetary ether, and thence to a still higher state, the secret of whose nature M. Figuier does not endeavour to penetrate, 'because our means of investigation fail at this point.' The ultimate destiny of the more glorified being is the Sun; the pure spirits who form its mass of burning gases, pour out germs and life to start the course of planetary existence. (Note to 2nd edition.)
44. Swedenborg, 'The True Christian Religion,' 13. Compare the notion attributed to the followers of Basilides the Gnostic, of men whose souls are affected by spirits or dispositions as of wolf, ape, lion, or bear, wherefore their souls bear the properties of these, and imitate their deeds (Clem. Alex. Stromat. ii. c. 20).
45. See J. G. Müller, 'Amer. Urrel.' p. 208 (Caribs); but compare Rochefort, p. 429. Steller, 'Kamtschatka,' p. 269; Castrén, 'Finnische Mythologie,' p. 119.
46. For Egyptian evidence see the funeral papyri and translations of the 'Book of the Dead.' Compare Brinton, 'Myths of New World,' p. 254, &c.
47. Aryan evidence in 'Rig-Veda,' x. 14, 8; xi. 1, 8; Manu, xii. 16-22; Max Müller, Todtenbestattung,' pp. xii. xiv.; 'Chips,' vol. i. p. 47; Muir in 'Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,' vol. i. 1865, p. 306; Spiegel, 'Avesta'; Haug, 'Essays on the Parsis.'
48. Origen, De Princip. ii. 3, 2: 'materiæ corporalis, cujus materiæ anima usum semper habet, in qualibet qualitate positæ, nunc quidem carnali, postmodum vero subtiliori et puriori, quæ spiritalis appellatur.'
49. Burton, 'Central Africa,' vol. ii. p. 345.
50. Callaway, 'Rel. of Amazulu,' p. 84.
51. 1
52. Mariner, 'Tonga Is.' vol. ii. p. 136; John Smith, 'Descr. of Virginia,' 33; Oviedo, 'Nicaragua,' p. 50. The reference to the Laos in Meiners, vol. ii. p. 760, is worthless.
53. Cranz, 'Grönland,' p. 259.
54. 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.
55. Bosman, 'Guinea' in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 401. See also Waitz, 'Anthropologie,' vol. ii. p. 191 (W. Afr.); Callaway, 'Rel. of Amazulu,' p. 355.
56. Cavazzi, 'Congo, Matamba, et Angola,' lib. i. p. 270. See also Liebrecht in 'Zeitschr. für Ethnologie,' vol. v. p. 96 (Tartary, Scandinavia, Greece).
57. Schoolcraft, 'Indian Tribes,' part i. p. 310; Bastian, 'Psychologie,' pp. 111, 193; Doolittle, 'Chinese,' vol. i. p. 235.
58. Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 323.
59. Kolben, p. 579.
60. Billings, p. 125.
61. Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien.' vol. i. p. 145; Cross, l.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.
62. Egede, 'Greenland,' p. 152; Cranz, p. 300.
63. Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 323; see pp. 329, 363.
64. Bowring, 'Siam,' vol. i. p. 122; Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien.' vol. iii. p. 258.
65. Castrén, 'Finn. Myth.' p. 120.
66. 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.
67. Oldfield in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iii. pp. 228, 236, 245.
68. Taylor, 'New Zealand,' p. 221; Schirren, p. 91; see Turner, 'Polynesia,' p. 233.
69. Morgan, 'League of Iroquois,' p. 174.
70. J. G. Müller, p. 286.
71. Castrén, 'Finn. Myth.' p. 126.
72. Cross in 'Journ. Amer. Or. Soc.' vol. iv. p. 309; Mason in 'Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,' 1865, part ii. p. 203. See also J. Anderson, 'Exp. to W. Yunnan,' pp. 126, 131 (Shans).
73. Bastian, 'Psychologie,' pp. 51, 99-101.
74. Lucian. De Luctu. See Pauly, 'Real. Encyclop.' and Smith, 'Dic. of Gr. and Rom. Ant.' s.v. 'inferi.'
75. Hanusch, 'Slaw. Myth.' p. 277.
76. Calmet, vol. ii. ch. xxxvi.; Brand, vol. iii. p. 67.
77. Charlevoix, 'Nouvelle France,' vol. vi. p. 75; Schoolcraft, 'Indian Tribes,' part i. pp. 39, 83; part iv. p. 65; Tanner's 'Narr.' p. 293.
78. Brebeuf in 'Rel. des Jés.' 1636, p. 104.
79. Ellis, 'Madagascar,' vol. i. pp. 253, 364. See Taylor, 'New Zealand,' p. 220.
80. Krapf, 'E. Afr.' p. 150.
81. T. J. Hutchinson, p. 206.
82. Cavazzi, 'Congo, &c.' lib. i. p. 264. So in ancient Greece, Lucian. Charon, 22.
83. Hodgson, 'Abor. of India,' p. 180.
84. 'Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. ii. p. 235.
85. Doolittle, 'Chinese,' vol. i. p. 173, &c.; vol. ii. p. 91, &c.; Meiners, vol. i. p. 306.
86. Wilkinson, 'Ancient Eg.' vol. ii. p. 362; Lucian. De Luctu, 21.
87. Manu, iii.; Colebrooke, 'Essays,' vol. i. p. 161, &c.; Pictet, 'Origines Indo-Europ.' part ii. p. 600; Ward, 'Hindoos,' vol. ii. p. 332.
88. Pauly, 'Real-Encyclop.' s.v. 'funus'; Smith's 'Dic.' s.v. 'funus.' See Meiners, vol. i. pp. 305-19.
89. Augustin. contra Faustum, xx. 4; De Civ. Dei, viii. 27; conf. vi. 2. See Beausobre, vol. ii. pp. 633, 685; Bingham, xx. c. 7.
90. Saint-Foix, 'Essais Historiques sur Paris,' in 'Œuvres,' vol. iv. p. 147, &c.
91. Lady Herbert, 'Impressions of Spain,' p. 8.
92. H. C. Romanoff, 'Rites and Customs of Greco-Russian Church,' p. 249; Ralston, 'Songs of the Russian People,' pp. 135, 320; St. Clair and Brophy, 'Bulgaria,' p. 77; Brand, 'Pop. Ant.' vol. i. p. 115.
93. Beside the accounts of annual festivals of the dead cited here, see the following: — Santos, 'Ethiopia,' in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 685 (Sept.); Brasseur, 'Mexique,' vol. iii. pp. 23, 522, 528 (Aug., Oct., Nov.); Rivero and Tschudi, 'Peru,' p. 134 (Peruvian feast dated as Nov. 2 in coincidence with All Souls', but this reckoning is vitiated by confusion of seasons of N. and S. hemisphere, see J. G. Müller, p. 389; moreover, the Peruvian feast may have been originally held at a different date, and transferred, as happened elsewhere, to the Spanish All Souls'); Doolittle, 'Chinese,' vol. ii. pp. 44, 62 (esp. Apr.); Caron, 'Japan,' in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 629 (Aug.).
94. Mason, 'Karens,' l. c. p. 238.
95. Hodgson, 'Abor. of India,' p. 147.
96. Munzinger, 'Ostafr. Stud.' p. 473.
97. Waitz, vol. ii. p. 194.
98. G. D'Alaux in 'Rev. des Deux Mondes,' May 15, 1852, p. 76.
99. Ovid. Fast. ii. 533; v. 420.
100. Spiegel, 'Avesta,' vol. ii. p. ci.; Alger, p. 137.
101. Hanusch, 'Slaw. Myth.' pp. 374, 408; St. Clair and Brophy, 'Bulgaria,' p. 77; Romanoff, 'Greco-Roman Church,' p. 255.
102. Petrus Damianus, 'Vita S. Odilonis,' in the Bollandist 'Acta Sanctorum,' Jan. 1, has the quaint legend attached to the new ordinance. An island hermit dwelt near a volcano, where souls of the wicked were tormented in the flames. The holy man heard the officiating demons lament that their daily task of new torture was interfered with by the prayers and alms of devout persons leagued against them to save souls, and especially they complained of the Monks of Cluny. Thereupon the hermit sent a message to Abbot Odilo, who carried out the work to the efficacy of which he had received such perfect spiritual testimony, by decreeing that November 2, the day after All Saints', should be set apart for services for the departed.
103. Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 336. Meiners, vol. i. p. 316; vol. ii. p. 290. Wuttke, 'Deutsche Volksaberglaube,' p. 216. Cortet, 'Fêtes Religieuses,' p. 233; 'Westminster Rev.' Jan. 1860; Hersart de la Villemarqué, 'Chants de la Bretagne,' vol. ii. p. 307.
104. Le Jeune in 'Rel. des Jés.' 1634, p. 16; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 195.
105. Cavazzi, 'Congo,' &c., book i. 265.
106. Grimm, 'D. M.' p. 865, but not so in the account of the Feast of the Dead in Boecler, 'Ehsten Abergl. Gebr.' (ed. Kreutzwald), p. 89. Compare Martius, 'Ethnog. Amer.' vol. i. p. 345 (Gês). The following passage from a spiritualist journal, 'The Medium,' Feb. 9, 1872, shows this primitive notion curiously surviving in modern England. 'Every time we sat at dinner, we had not only spirit-voices calling to us, but spirit-hands touching us; and last evening, as it was his farewell, they gave us a special manifestation, unasked for and unlooked for. He sitting at the right hand of me, a vacant chair opposite to him began moving, and, in answer to whether it would have some dinner, said "Yes." I then asked it to select what it would take, when it chose croquets des pommes de terre (a French way of dressing potatoes, about three inches long and two wide. I will send you one that you may see it). I was desired to put this on the chair, either in a tablespoon or on a plate. I placed it in a tablespoon, thinking that probably the plate might be broken. In a few seconds I was told that it was eaten, and looking, found the half of it gone, with the marks showing the teeth.' (Note to 2nd ed.)
107. Taylor, 'New Zealand,' p. 220, see 104.
108. Brasseur, 'Mexique,' vol. iii. p. 24.
109. Colebrooke, 'Essays,' vol. i. p. 163, &c.; Manu. iii.
110. Hanusch, 'Slaw. Myth.' p. 408; Hartknoch, 'Preussen,' part i. p. 187.
111. Doolittle, 'Chinese,' vol. ii. pp. 33, 48; Meiners, vol. i. p. 318.
112. Borri, 'Relatione della Nuova Missione della Comp. di Giesu,' Rome, 1631, p. 208; and in Pinkerton, vol. ix. p. 822, &c.
113. Grout, 'Zulu Land,' p. 140; see Callaway, 'Rel. of Amazulu,' p. 11.
114. Caron, 'Japan,' vol. vii. p. 629; see Turpin, 'Siam,' ibid. vol. ix. p. 590.
115. Ovid. Fast. ii. 533.
116. Legge, 'Confucius,' pp. 101-2, 130; Bunsen, 'God in History,' p. 271.
117. Brand, 'Pop. Ant.' vol. i. p. 392, vol. ii. p. 289.