‘Yon child is dreaming far away,And is not where he seems.’
‘Yon child is dreaming far away,And is not where he seems.’
‘Yon child is dreaming far away,And is not where he seems.’
‘Yon child is dreaming far away,
And is not where he seems.’
This opinion, however, only constitutes one of several parts of the theory of dreams in savage psychology. Another part has also a place here, the view that human souls come from without to visit the sleeper, who sees them as dreams. These two views are by no means incompatible. The North American Indians allowed themselves the alternative of supposing a dream to be either a visit from the soul of the person or object dreamt of, or a sight seen by the rational soul, gone out for an excursion while the sensitivesoul remains in the body.[673]So the Zulu may be visited in a dream by the shade of an ancestor, the itongo, who comes to warn him of danger, or he may himself be taken by the itongo in a dream to visit his distant people, and see that they are in trouble; as for the man who is passing into the morbid condition of the professional seer, phantoms are continually coming to talk to him in his sleep, till he becomes, as the expressive native phrase is, ‘a house of dreams.’[674]In the lower range of culture, it is perhaps most frequently taken for granted that a man’s apparition in a dream is a visit from his disembodied spirit, which the dreamer, to use an expressive Ojibwa idiom, ‘sees when asleep.’ Such a thought comes out clearly in the Fijian opinion that a living man’s spirit may leave the body, to trouble other people in their sleep;[675]or in a recent account of an old Indian woman of British Columbia sending for the medicine-man to drive away the dead people who came to her every night.[676]A modern observer’s description of the state of mind of the negroes of West Africa in this respect is extremely characteristic and instructive. ‘All their dreams are construed into visits from the spirits of their deceased friends. The cautions, hints, and warnings which come to them through this source are received with the most serious and deferential attention, and are always acted upon in their waking hours. The habit of relating their dreams, which is universal, greatly promotes the habit of dreaming itself, and hence their sleeping hours are characterized by almost as much intercourse with the dead as their waking are with the living. This is, no doubt, one of the reasons of their excessive superstitiousness. Their imaginations become so lively that they can scarcely distinguish between their dreams and their waking thoughts, between the real and the ideal, andthey consequently utter falsehood without intending, and profess to see things which never existed.’[677]
To the Greek of old, the dream-soul was what to the modern savage it still is. Sleep, loosing cares of mind, fell on Achilles as he lay by the sounding sea, and there stood over him the soul of Patroklos, like to him altogether in stature, and the beauteous eyes, and the voice, and the garments that wrapped his skin; he spake, and Achilles stretched out to grasp him with loving hands, but caught him not, and like a smoke the soul sped twittering below the earth. Along the ages that separate us from Homeric times, the apparition in dreams of men living or dead has been a subject of philosophic speculation and of superstitious fear.[678]Both the phantom of the living and the ghost of the dead figure in Cicero’s typical tale. Two Arcadians came to Megara together, one lodged at a friend’s house, the other at an inn. In the night this latter appeared to his fellow-traveller, imploring his help, for the innkeeper was plotting his death; the sleeper sprang up in alarm, but thinking the vision of no consequence went to sleep again. Then a second time his companion appeared to him, to entreat that though he had failed to help, he would at least avenge, for the innkeeper had killed him and hidden his body in a dung-cart, wherefore he charged his fellow-traveller to be early next morning at the city-gate before the cart passed out. Struck with this second dream, the traveller went as bidden, and there found the cart; the body of the murdered man was in it, and the innkeeper was brought to justice. ‘Quid hoc somnio dici potest divinius!’[679]Augustine discusses with reference to the nature of the soul various dream-stories of his time, where the apparitions of men dead or living are seen in dreams.In one of the latter he himself figured, for when a disciple of his, Eulogius the rhetor of Carthage, once could not get to sleep for thinking of an obscure passage in Cicero’s Rhetoric, that night Augustine came to him in a dream and explained it. But Augustine’s tendency was toward the modern theory of dreams, and in this case he says it was certainly his image that appeared, not himself, who was far across the sea, neither knowing nor caring about the matter.[680]As we survey the immense series of dream-stories of similar types in patristic, mediæval, and modern literature, we may find it difficult enough to decide which are truth and which are fiction. But along the course of these myriad narratives of human phantoms appearing in dreams to cheer or torment, to warn or inform, or to demand fulfilment of their own desires, the problem of dream-apparitions may be traced in progress of gradual determination, from the earlier conviction that a disembodied soul really comes into the presence of the sleeper, toward the later opinion that such a phantasm is produced in the dreamer’s mind without the perception of any external objective figure.
The evidence of visions corresponds with the evidence of dreams in their bearing on primitive theories of the soul,[681]and the two classes of phenomena substantiate and supplement one another. Even in healthy waking life, the savage or barbarian has never learnt to make that rigid distinction between subjective and objective, between imagination and reality, to enforce which is one of the main results of scientific education. Still less, when disordered in body and mind he sees around him phantom human forms, can he distrust the evidence of his very senses. Thus it comes to pass that throughout the lower civilization men believe, with the most vivid and intense belief, in the objective reality of the human spectres which they see in sickness, exhaustion, or excitement. As will be hereafter noticed, one main reason of the practices of fasting, penance, narcotising by drugs, andother means of bringing on morbid exaltation, is that the patients may obtain the sight of spectral beings, from whom they look to gain spiritual knowledge and even worldly power. Human ghosts are among the principal of these phantasmal figures. There is no doubt that honest visionaries describe ghosts as they really appear to their perception, while even the impostors who pretend to see them conform to the descriptions thus established; thus, in West Africa, a man’sklaor soul, becoming at his death asisaor ghost, can remain in the house with the corpse, but is only visible to the wong-man, the spirit-doctor.[682]Sometimes the phantom has the characteristic quality of not being visible to all of an assembled company. Thus the natives of the Antilles believed that the dead appeared on the roads when one went alone, but not when many went together;[683]thus among the Finns the ghosts of the dead were to be seen by the shamans, but not by men generally unless in dreams.[684]Such is perhaps the meaning of the description of Samuel’s ghost, visible to the witch of Endor, but not to Saul, for he has to ask her what it is she sees.[685]Yet this test of the nature of an apparition is one which easily breaks down. We know well how in civilized countries a current rumour of some one having seen a phantom is enough to bring a sight of it to others whose minds are in a properly receptive state. The condition of the modern ghost-seer, whose imagination passes on such slight excitement into positive hallucination is rather the rule than the exception among uncultured and intensely imaginative tribes, whose minds may be thrown off their balance by a touch, a word, a gesture, an unaccustomed noise. Among savage tribes, however, as among civilized races who have inherited remains of early philosophy formed under similar conditions, the doctrine of visibility orinvisibility of phantoms has been obviously shaped with reference to actual experience. To declare that souls or ghosts are necessarily either visible or invisible, would directly contradict the evidence of men’s senses. But to assert or imply, as the lower races do, that they are visible sometimes and to some persons, but not always or to every one, is to lay down an explanation of facts which is not indeed our usual modern explanation, but which is a perfectly rational and intelligible product of early science.
Without discussing on their merits the accounts of what is called ‘second sight,’ it may be pointed out that they are related among savage tribes, as when Captain Jonathan Carver obtained from a Cree medicine-man a true prophecy of the arrival of a canoe with news next day at noon; or when Mr.J.Mason Brown, travelling with two voyageurs on the Coppermine River, was met by Indians of the very band he was seeking, these having been sent by their medicine-man, who, on enquiry, stated that ‘He saw them coming, and heard them talk on their journey.’[686]These are analogous to accounts of the Highland second-sight, as when Pennant heard of a gentleman of the Hebrides, said to have the convenient gift of foreseeing visitors in time to get ready for them, or when Dr. Johnson was told by another laird that a labouring man of his had predicted his return to the island, and described the peculiar livery his servant had been newly dressed in.[687]
As a general rule, people are apt to consider it impossible for a man to be in two places at once, and indeed a saying to that effect has become a popular saw. But the rule is so far from being universally accepted, that the word ‘bilocation’ has been invented to express the miraculous faculty possessed by certain Saints of the Roman Church, of being in two places at once; likeSt.Alfonso di Liguori, who had the useful power of preaching his sermon in church whilehe was confessing penitents at home.[688]The reception and explanation of these various classes of stories fit perfectly with the primitive animistic theory of apparitions, and the same is true of the following most numerous class of the second-sight narratives.
Death is the event which, in all stages of culture, brings thought to bear most intensely, though not always most healthily, on the problems of psychology. The apparition of the disembodied soul has in all ages been thought to bear especial relation to its departure from its body at death. This is well shown by the reception not only of a theory of ghosts, but of a special doctrine of ‘wraiths’ or ‘fetches.’ Thus the Karens say that a man’s spirit, appearing after death, may thus announce it.[689]In New Zealand it is ominous to see the figure of an absent person, for if it be shadowy and the face not visible, his death may ere long be expected, but if the face be seen he is dead already. A party of Maoris (one of whom told the story) were seated round a fire in the open air, when there appeared, seen only by two of them, the figure of a relative left ill at home; they exclaimed, the figure vanished, and on the return of the party it appeared that the sick man had died about the time of the vision.[690]Examining the position of the doctrine of wraiths among the higher races, we find it especially prominent in three intellectual districts, Christian hagiology, popular folklore, and modern spiritualism.St.Anthony saw the soul ofSt.Ammonius carried to heaven in the midst of choirs of angels, the same day that the holy hermit died five days’ journey off in the desert of Nitria; whenSt.Ambrose died on Easter Eve, several newly-baptized children saw the holy bishop, and pointed him out to their parents, but these with their less pure eyes could not behold him; and so forth.[691]Folklore examples abound in Silesia and the Tyrol, where the gift of wraith-seeing still flourishes, with the customary details of funerals, churches, four-cross-roads, and headless phantoms, and an especial association with New Year’s Eve. The accounts of ‘second-sight’ from North Britain mostly belong to a somewhat older date. Thus theSt.Kilda people used to be haunted by their own spectral doubles, forerunners of impending death, and in 1799 a traveller writes of the peasants of Kirkcudbrightshire, ‘It is common among them to fancy that they see the wraiths of persons dying, which will be visible to one and not to others present with him. Within these last twenty years, it was hardly possible to meet with any person who had not seen many wraiths and ghosts in the course of his experience.’ Those who discuss the authenticity of the second-sight stories as actual evidence, must bear in mind that they prove a little too much; they vouch not only for human apparitions, but for such phantoms as demon-dogs, and for still more fanciful symbolic omens. Thus a phantom shroud seen in spiritual vision on a living man predicts his death, immediate if it is up to his head, less nearly approaching if it is only up to his waist; and to see in spiritual vision a spark of fire fall upon a person’s arm or breast, is a forerunner of a dead child to be seen in his arms.[692]As visionaries often see phantoms of living persons without any remarkable event coinciding with their hallucinations, it is naturally admitted that a man’s phantom or ‘double’ may be seen without portending anything in particular. The spiritualistic theory specially insists on cases of apparition where the person’s death corresponds more or less nearly with the time when some friend perceives his phantom.[693]Narratives of this class, which I can here only specify without arguing on them, areabundantly in circulation. Thus, I have an account by a lady, who ‘saw, as it were, the form of some one laid out,’ near the time when a brother died at Melbourne, and who mentions another lady known to her, who thought she saw her own father look in at the church window at the moment he was dying in his own house. Another account is sent me by a Shetland lady, who relates that about twenty years ago she and a girl leading her pony recognized the familiar figure of one Peter Sutherland, whom they knew to be at the time in ill-health in Edinburgh; he turned a corner and they saw no more of him, but next week came the news of his sudden death.
That the apparitional human soul bears the likeness of its fleshly body, is the principle implicitly accepted by all who believe it really and objectively present in dreams and visions. My own view is that nothing but dreams and visions could have ever put into men’s minds such an idea as that of souls being ethereal images of bodies. It is thus habitually taken for granted in animistic philosophy, savage or civilized, that souls set free from the earthly body are recognized by a likeness to it which they still retain, whether as ghostly wanderers on earth or inhabitants of the world beyond the grave. Man’s spirit, says Swedenborg, is his mind, which lives after death in complete human form, and this is the poet’s dictum in ‘In Memoriam:’
‘Eternal form shall still divideThe eternal soul from all beside;And I shall know him when we meet.’
‘Eternal form shall still divideThe eternal soul from all beside;And I shall know him when we meet.’
‘Eternal form shall still divideThe eternal soul from all beside;And I shall know him when we meet.’
‘Eternal form shall still divide
The eternal soul from all beside;
And I shall know him when we meet.’
This world-wide thought, coming into view here in a multitude of cases from all grades of culture, needs no collection of ordinary instances to illustrate it.[694]But a quaint and special group of beliefs will serve to display the thoroughnesswith which the soul is thus conceived as an image of the body. As a consistent corollary to such an opinion, it is argued that the mutilation of the body will have a corresponding effect upon the soul, and very low savage races have philosophy enough to work out this idea. Thus it was recorded of the Indians of Brazil by one of the early European visitors, that they ‘believe that the dead arrive in the other world wounded or hacked to pieces, in fact just as they left this.’[695]Thus, too, the Australian who has slain his enemy will cut off the right thumb of the corpse, so that although the spirit will become a hostile ghost, it cannot throw with its mutilated hand the shadowy spear, and may be safely left to wander, malignant but harmless.[696]The negro fears long sickness before death, such as will send him lean and feeble into the next world. His theory of the mutilation of soul with body could not be brought more vividly into view than in that ugly story of the West Indian planter, whose slaves began to seek in suicide at once relief from present misery and restoration to their native land; but the white man was too cunning for them, he cut off the heads and hands of the corpses, and the survivors saw that not even death could save them from a master who could maim their very souls in the next world.[697]The same rude and primitive belief continues among nations risen far higher in intellectual rank. The Chinese hold in especial horror the punishment of decapitation, considering that he who quits this world lacking a member will so arrive in the next, and a case is recorded lately of a criminal at Amoy who for this reason begged to die instead by the cruel death of crucifixion, and was crucified accordingly.[698]The series ends as usual in the folklore of the civilized world. The phantom skeleton in chains that haunted the house atBologna, showed the way to the garden where was buried the real chained fleshless skeleton it belonged to, and came no more when the remains had been duly buried. When the Earl of Cornwall met the fetch of his friend William Rufus carried black and naked on a black goat across the Bodmin moors, he saw that it was wounded through the midst of the breast; and afterwards he heard that at that very hour the king had been slain in the New Forest by the arrow of Walter Tirell.[699]
In studying the nature of the soul as conceived among the lower races, and in tracing such conceptions onward among the higher, circumstantial details are available. It is as widely recognized among mankind that souls or ghosts have voices, as that they have visible forms, and indeed the evidence for both is of the same nature. Men who perceive evidently that souls do talk when they present themselves in dream or vision, naturally take for granted at once the objective reality of the ghostly voice, and of the ghostly form from which it proceeds. This is involved in the series of narratives of spiritual communications with living men, from savagery onward to civilization, while the more modern doctrine of the subjectivity of such phenomena recognizes the phenomena themselves, but offers a different explanation of them. One special conception, however, requires particular notice. This defines the spirit-voice as being a low murmur, chirp, or whistle, as it were the ghost of a voice. The Algonquin Indians of North America could hear the shadow-souls of the dead chirp like crickets.[700]The divine spirits of the New Zealand dead, coming to converse with the living, utter their words in whistling tones, and such utterances by a squeaking noise are mentioned elsewhere in Polynesia.[701]The Zulu diviner’s familiarspirits are ancestral manes, who talk in a low whistling tone short of a full whistle, whence they have their name of ‘imilozi’ or whistlers.[702]These ideas correspond with classic descriptions of the ghostly voice, as a ‘twitter or ‘thin murmur:’
Ψυχὴ δὲ κατὰ χθονὸς ἠύτε καπνὸς,Ψχετο τετριγυία.’[703]‘Umbra cruenta Remi visa est assistere lecto,Atque haec exiguo murmure verba loqui.’[704]
Ψυχὴ δὲ κατὰ χθονὸς ἠύτε καπνὸς,Ψχετο τετριγυία.’[703]‘Umbra cruenta Remi visa est assistere lecto,Atque haec exiguo murmure verba loqui.’[704]
Ψυχὴ δὲ κατὰ χθονὸς ἠύτε καπνὸς,Ψχετο τετριγυία.’[703]
Ψυχὴ δὲ κατὰ χθονὸς ἠύτε καπνὸς,
Ψχετο τετριγυία.’[703]
‘Umbra cruenta Remi visa est assistere lecto,Atque haec exiguo murmure verba loqui.’[704]
‘Umbra cruenta Remi visa est assistere lecto,
Atque haec exiguo murmure verba loqui.’[704]
As the attributes of the soul or ghost extend to other spiritual beings, and the utterances of such are to a great extent given by the voice of mediums, we connect these accounts with the notion that the language of demons is also a low whistle or mutter, whence the well-known practice of whispering or murmuring charms, the ‘susurrus necromanticus’ of sorcerers, to whom the already cited description of ‘wizards that peep (i.e. chirp) and mutter’ is widely applicable.[705]
The conception of dreams and visions as caused by present objective figures, and the identification of such phantom souls with the shadow and the breath, has led to the treatment of souls as substantial material beings. Thus it is a usual proceeding to make openings through solid materials to allow souls to pass. The Iroquois in old times used to leave an opening in the grave for the lingering soul to visit its body, and some of them stillbore holes in the coffin for the same purpose.[706]The Malagasy sorcerer, for the cure of a sick man who had lost his soul, would make a hole in a burial-house to let out a spirit which he would catch in his cap and so convey to the patient’s head.[707]The Chinese make a hole in the roof to let out the soul at death.[708]And lastly, the custom of opening a window or door for the departing soul when it quits the body is to this day a very familiar superstition in France, Germany, and England.[709]Again, the souls of the dead are thought susceptible of being beaten, hurt and driven like any other living creatures. Thus the Queensland aborigines would beat the air in an annual mock fight, held to scare away the souls that death had let loose among the living since last year.[710]Thus North American Indians, when they had tortured an enemy to death, ran about crying and beating with sticks to scare the ghost away; they have been known to set nets round their cabins to catch and keep out neighbours’ departed souls; fancying the soul of a dying man to go out at the wigwam roof, they would habitually beat the sides with sticks to drive it forth; we even hear of the widow going off from her husband’s funeral followed by a person flourishing a handful of twigs about her head like a flyflapper, to drive off her husband’s ghost and leave her free to marry again.[711]With a kindlier feeling, the Congo negroes abstained for a whole year after a death from sweeping the house, lest the dust should injure the delicate substance of the ghost;[712]the Tonquinese avoided house-cleaning during the festival when the souls of the dead came back to theirhouses for the New Year’s visit;[713]and it seems likely that the special profession of the Roman‘everriatores’who swept the houses out after a funeral, was connected with a similar idea.[714]To this day, it remains a German peasants’ saying that it is wrong to slam a door, lest one should pinch a soul in it.[715]The not uncommon practice of strewing ashes to show the footprints of ghosts or demons takes for granted that they are substantial bodies. In the literature of animism, extreme tests of the weight of ghosts are now and then forthcoming. They range from the declaration of a Basuto diviner that the late queen had been bestriding his shoulders, and he never felt such a weight in his life, to Glanvil’s story of David Hunter the neat-herd, who lifted up the old woman’s ghost, and she felt just like a bag of feathers in his arms, or the pathetic German superstition that the dead mother’s coming back in the night to suckle the baby she has left on earth, may be known by the hollow pressed down in the bed where she lay, and at last down to the alleged modern spiritualistic reckoning of the weight of a human soul at from 3 to 4 ounces.[716]
Explicit statements as to the substance of soul are to be found both among low and high races, in an instructive series of definitions. The Tongans imagined the human soul to be the finer or more aeriform part of the body, which leaves it suddenly at the moment of death; something comparable to the perfume and essence of a flower as related to the more solid vegetable fibre.[717]The Greenland seers described the soul as they habitually perceived it in their visions; it is pale and soft, they said, and he who tries to seize it feels nothing, for it has no flesh nor bonenor sinew.[718]The Caribs did not think the soul so immaterial as to be invisible, but said it was subtle and thin like a purified body.[719]Turning to higher races, we may take the Siamese as an example of a people who conceive of souls as consisting of subtle matter escaping sight and touch, or as united to a swiftly moving aerial body.[720]In the classic world, it is recorded as an opinion of Epicurus that ‘they who say the soul is incorporeal talk folly, for it could neither do nor suffer anything were it such.’[721]Among the Fathers, Irenæus describes souls as incorporeal in comparison with mortal bodies,[722]and Tertullian relates a vision or revelation of a certain Montanist prophetess, of the soul seen by her corporeally, thin and lucid, aerial in colour and human in form.[723]For an example of mediæval doctrine, may be cited a14th-century English poem, the ‘Ayenbite of Inwyt’ (i.e. ‘Remorse of Conscience’) which points out how the soul, by reason of the thinness of its substance, suffers all the more in purgatory:
‘The soul is more tendre and nescheThan the bodi that hath bones and fleysche;Thanne the soul that is so tendere of kinde,Mote nedis hure penaunce hardere y-finde,Than eni bodi that evere on live was.’[724]
‘The soul is more tendre and nescheThan the bodi that hath bones and fleysche;Thanne the soul that is so tendere of kinde,Mote nedis hure penaunce hardere y-finde,Than eni bodi that evere on live was.’[724]
‘The soul is more tendre and nescheThan the bodi that hath bones and fleysche;Thanne the soul that is so tendere of kinde,Mote nedis hure penaunce hardere y-finde,Than eni bodi that evere on live was.’[724]
‘The soul is more tendre and nesche
Than the bodi that hath bones and fleysche;
Thanne the soul that is so tendere of kinde,
Mote nedis hure penaunce hardere y-finde,
Than eni bodi that evere on live was.’[724]
The doctrine of the ethereal soul passed on into more modern philosophy, and the European peasant holds fast to it still; as Wuttke says, the ghosts of the dead have to him a misty and evanescent materiality, for they have bodies as we have, though of other kind: they can eat and drink, they can be wounded and killed.[725]Nor was the ancientdoctrine ever more distinctly stated than by a modern spiritualistic writer, who observes that ‘a spirit is no immaterial substance; on the contrary, the spiritual organization is composed of matter ... in a very high state of refinement and attenuation.’[726]
Among rude races, the original conception of the human soul seems to have been that of ethereality, or vaporous materiality, which has held so large a place in human thought ever since. In fact, the later metaphysical notion of immateriality could scarcely have conveyed any meaning to a savage. It is moreover to be noticed that, as to the whole nature and action of apparitional souls, the lower philosophy escapes various difficulties which down to modern times have perplexed metaphysicians and theologians of the civilized world. Considering the thin ethereal body of the soul to be itself sufficient and suitable for visibility, movement, and speech, the primitive animists required no additional hypotheses to account for these manifestations; they had no place for theories such as detailed by Calmet, as that immaterial souls have their own vaporous bodies, or occasionally have such vaporous bodies provided for them by supernatural means to enable them to appear as spectres, or that they possess the power of condensing the circumambient air into phantom-like bodies to invest themselves in, or of forming from it vocal instruments.[727]It appears to have been within systematic schools of civilized philosophy that the transcendental definitions of the immaterial soul were obtained, by abstraction from the primitive conception of the ethereal-material soul, so as to reduce it from a physical to a metaphysical entity.
Departing from the body at the time of death, the soul or spirit is considered set free to linger near the tomb, to wander on earth or flit in the air, or to travel to the proper region of spirits—the world beyond the grave. The principal conceptions of the lower psychology as to a FutureLife will be considered in the following chapters, but for the present purpose of investigating the theory of souls in general, it will be well to enter here upon one department of the subject. Men do not stop short at the persuasion that death releases the soul to a free and active existence, but they quite logically proceed to assist nature, by slaying men in order to liberate their souls for ghostly uses. Thus there arises one of the most widespread, distinct, and intelligible rites of animistic religion—that of funeral human sacrifice for the service of the dead. When a man of rank dies and his soul departs to its own place, wherever and whatever that place may be, it is a rational inference of early philosophy that the souls of attendants, slaves, and wives, put to death at his funeral, will make the same journey and continue their service in the next life, and the argument is frequently stretched further, to include the souls of new victims sacrificed in order that they may enter upon the same ghostly servitude. It will appear from the ethnography of this rite that it is not strongly marked in the very lowest levels of culture, but that, arising in the lower barbaric stage, it develops itself in the higher, and thenceforth continues or dwindles in survival.
Of the murderous practices to which this opinion leads, remarkably distinct accounts may be cited from among tribes of the Indian Archipelago. The following account is given of the funerals of great men among the rude Kayans of Borneo:—‘Slaves are killed in order that they may follow the deceased and attend upon him. Before they are killed the relations who surround them enjoin them to take great care of their master when they join him, to watch and shampoo him when he is indisposed, to be always near him, and to obey all his behests. The female relatives of the deceased then take a spear and slightly wound the victims, after which the males spear them to death.’ Again, the opinion of the Idaan is ‘that all whom they kill in this world shall attend them as slaves after death. This notion of future interest in the destruction of the human species isa great impediment to an intercourse with them, as murder goes farther than present advantage or resentment. From the same principle they will purchase a slave, guilty of any capital crime, at fourfold his value, that they may be his executioners.’ With the same idea is connected the ferocious custom of ‘head-hunting,’ so prevalent among the Dayaks before Rajah Brooke’s time. They considered that the owner of every human head they could procure would serve them in the next world, where, indeed, a man’s rank would be according to his number of heads in this. They would continue the mourning for a dead man till a head was brought in, to provide him with a slave to accompany him to the ‘habitation of souls;’ a father who lost his child would go out and kill the first man he met, as a funeral ceremony; a young man might not marry till he had procured a head, and some tribes would bury with a dead man the first head he had taken, together with spears, cloth, rice, and betel. Waylaying and murdering men for their heads became, in fact, the Dayaks’ national sport, and they remarked ‘the white men read books, we hunt for heads instead.’[728]Of such rites in the Pacific islands, the most hideously purposeful accounts reach us from the Fiji group. Till lately, a main part of the ceremony of a great man’s funeral was the strangling of wives, friends, and slaves, for the distinct purpose of attending him into the world of spirits. Ordinarily the first victim was the wife of the deceased, and more than one if he had several, and their corpses, oiled as for a feast, clothed with new fringed girdles, with heads dressed and ornamented, and vermilion and turmeric powder spread on their faces and bosoms, were laid by the side of the dead warrior. Associates and inferior attendants were likewise slain, and these bodieswere spoken of as ‘grass for bedding the grave.’ When Ra Mbithi, the pride of Somosomo, was lost at sea, seventeen of his wives were killed; and after the news of the massacre of the Namena people, in 1839, eighty women were strangled to accompany the spirits of their murdered husbands. Such sacrifices took place under the same pressure of public opinion which kept up the widow-burning in modern India. The Fijian widow was worked upon by her relatives with all the pressure of persuasion and of menace; she understood well that life to her henceforth would mean a wretched existence of neglect, disgrace, and destitution; and tyrannous custom, as hard to struggle against in the savage as in the civilized world, drove her to the grave. Thus, far from resisting, she became importunate for death, and the new life to come, and till public opinion reached a more enlightened state, the missionaries often used their influence in vain to save from the strangling-cord some wife whom they could have rescued, but who herself refused to live. So repugnant to the native mind was the idea of a chieftain going unattended into the other world, that the missionaries’ prohibition of the cherished custom was one reason of the popular dislike to Christianity. Many of the nominal Christians, when once a chief of theirs was shot from an ambush, esteemed it most fortunate that a stray shot at the same time killed a young man at a distance from him, and thus provided a companion for the spirit of the slain chief.[729]
In America, the funeral human sacrifice makes its characteristic appearance. A good example may be taken from among the Osages, whose habit was sometimes to plant in the cairn raised over a corpse a pole with an enemy’s scalp hanging to the top. Their notion was that by taking an enemy and suspending his scalp over the grave of a deceased friend, the spirit of the victim became subjected to the spiritof the buried warrior in the land of spirits. Hence the last and best service that could be performed for a deceased relative was to take an enemy’s life, and thus transmit it by his scalp.[730]The correspondence of this idea with that just mentioned among the Dayaks is very striking. With a similar intention, the Caribs would slay on the dead master’s grave any of his slaves they could lay hands on.[731]Among the native peoples risen to considerably higher grades of social and political life, these practices were not suppressed but exaggerated, in the ghastly sacrifices of warriors, slaves, and wives, who departed to continue their duteous offices at the funeral of the chief or monarch in Central America[732]and Mexico,[733]in Bogota[734]and Peru.[735]It is interesting to notice, in somewhat favourable contrast with these customs of comparatively cultured American nations, the practice of certain rude tribes of the North-West. The Quakeolths, for instance, did not actually sacrifice the widow, but they made her rest her head on her husband’s corpse while it was being burned, until at last she was dragged more dead than alive from the flames; if she recovered, she collected her husband’s ashes and carried them about with her for three years, during which any levity or deficiency of grief would render her an outcast. This looks like a mitigated survival from an earlier custom of actual widow-burning.[736]
Of such funeral rites, carried out to the death, graphicand horrid descriptions are recorded in the countries across Africa—East, Central, and West. A headman of the Wadoe is buried sitting in a shallow pit, and with the corpse a male and female slave alive, he with a bill-hook in his hand to cut fuel for his lord in the death-world, she seated on a little stool with the dead chief’s head in her lap. A chief of Unyamwezi is entombed in a vaulted pit, sitting on a low stool with a bow in his right hand, and provided with a pot of native beer; with him are shut in alive three women slaves, and the ceremony is concluded with a libation of beer on the earth heaped up above them all. The same idea which in Guinea makes it common for the living to send messages by the dying to the dead, is developed in Ashanti and Dahome into a monstrous system of massacre. The King of Dahome must enter Deadland with a ghostly court of hundreds of wives, eunuchs, singers, drummers, and soldiers. Nor is this all. Captain Burton thus describes the yearly ‘Customs:’—‘They periodically supply the departed monarch with fresh attendants in the shadowy world. For unhappily these murderous scenes are an expression, lamentably mistaken but perfectly sincere, of the liveliest filial piety.’ Even this annual slaughter must be supplemented by almost daily murder:—‘Whatever action, however trivial, is performed by the King, it must dutifully be reported to his sire in the shadowy realm. A victim, almost always a war-captive, is chosen; the message is delivered to him, an intoxicating draught of rum follows it, and he is dispatched to Hades in the best of humours.’[737]In southern districts of Africa, accounts of the same class begin in Congo and Angola with the recorded slaying of the dead man’s favourite wives, to live with him in the other world, a practice still in vogue among the Chevas of the Zambesi district, and formerly known among the Maravis; while the funeral sacrifice of attendants with a chief is athing of the past among the Barotse, as among the Zulus, who yet have not forgotten the days when the chief’s servants and attendant warriors were cast into the fire which had consumed his body, that they might go with him, and prepare things beforehand, and get food for him.[738]
If now we turn to the records of Asia and Europe, we shall find the sacrifice of attendants for the dead widely prevalent in both continents in old times, while in the east its course may be traced continuing onward to our own day. The two Mohammedans who travelled in Southern Asia in the ninth century relate that on the accession of certain kings a quantity of rice is prepared, which is eaten by some three or four hundred men, who present themselves voluntarily to share it, thereby undertaking to burn themselves at the monarch’s death. With this corresponds Marco Polo’s thirteenth-century account in Southern India of the king of Maabar’s guard of horsemen, who, when he dies and his body is burnt, throw themselves into the fire to do him service in the next world.[739]In the seventeenth century the practice is described as still prevailing in Japan, where, on the death of a nobleman, from ten to thirty of his servants put themselves to death by the ‘hara kari,’ or ripping-up, having indeed engaged during his lifetime, by the solemn compact of drinking wine together, to give their bodies to their lord at his death. Yet already in ancient times such funeral sacrifices were passing into survival, when the servants who followed their master in death were replaced by clay images set up at the tomb.[740]Among the Ossetes of the Caucasus, an interesting relic of widow-sacrifice is still kept up: the dead man’s widow and his saddle-horse are led thrice round the grave, and no man may marry thewidow or mount the horse thus devoted.[741]In China, legend preserves the memory of the ancient funeral human sacrifice. The brother of Chin Yang, a disciple of Confucius, died, and his widow and steward wished to bury some living persons with him, to serve him in the regions below. Thereupon the sage suggested that the proper victims would be the widow and steward themselves, but this not precisely meeting their views, the matter dropped, and the deceased was interred without attendants. This story at least shows the rite to have been not only known but understood in China long ago. In modern China, the suicide of widows to accompany their husbands is a recognized practice, sometimes even performed in public. Moreover, the ceremonies of providing sedan-bearers and an umbrella-bearer for the dead, and sending mounted horsemen to announce beforehand his arrival to the authorities of Hades, although these bearers and messengers are only made of paper and burnt, seem to represent survivals of a more murderous reality.[742]
The Aryan race gives striking examples of the rite of funeral human sacrifice in its sternest shape, whether in history or in myth, that records as truly as history the manners of old days.[743]The episodes of the Trojan captives laid with the horses and hounds on the funeral pile of Patroklos, and of Evadne throwing herself into the funeral pile of her husband, and Pausanias’s narrative of the suicide of the three Messenian widows, are among its Greek representatives.[744]In Scandinavian myth, Baldr is burnt with hisdwarf foot-page, his horse and saddle; Brynhild lies on the pile by her beloved Sigurd, and men and maids follow after them on the hell-way.[745]The Gauls in Cæsar’s time burned at the dead man’s sumptuous funeral whatever was dear to him, animals also, and much-loved slaves and clients.[746]Old mentions of Slavonic heathendom describe the burning of the dead with clothing and weapons, horses and hounds, with faithful servants, and above all, with wives. ThusSt.Boniface says that ‘the Wends keep matrimonial love with so great zeal, that the wife may refuse to survive her husband, and she is held praiseworthy among women who slays herself by her own hand, that she may be burnt on one pyre with her lord.’[747]This Aryan rite of widow-sacrifice has not only an ethnographic and antiquarian interest, but even a place in modern politics. In Brahmanic India the widow of a Hindu of the Brahman or the Kshatriya caste was burnt on the funeral pile with her husband, as asatîor ‘good woman,’ which word has passed into English assuttee. Mentioned in classic and mediæval times, the practice was in full vigour at the beginning of the last century.[748]Often one dead husband took many wives with him. Some went willingly and gaily to the new life, many were driven by force of custom, by fear of disgrace, by family persuasion, by priestly threats and promises, by sheer violence. When the rite was suppressed under modern British rule, the priesthood resisted to the uttermost, appealing to the Veda, as sanctioning the ordinance, and demanding that the foreign rulers should respect it. Yet in fact, asProf.H. H.Wilson proved, the priests had actually falsified their sacred Veda in support of a rite enjoined by long and inveterate prejudice, but not by the traditional standards of Hindu faith. The ancient Brahmanicfuneral rites have been minutely detailed from the Sanskrit authorities in an essay byProf.Max Müller. Their directions are that the widow is to be set on the funeral pile with her husband’s corpse, and if he be a warrior his bow is to be placed there too. But then a brother-in-law or adopted child or old servant is to lead the widow down again at the summons, ‘Rise, woman, come to the world of life; thou sleepest nigh unto him whose life is gone. Come to us. Thou hast thus fulfilled thy duties of a wife to the husband who once took thy hand, and made thee a mother.’ The bow, however, is to be broken and thrown back upon the pile, and the dead man’s sacrificial instruments are to be laid with him and really consumed. While admitting that the modern ordinance of Suttee-burning is a corrupt departure from the early Brahmanic ritual, we may nevertheless find reason to consider the practice as not a new invention by the later Hindu priesthood, but as the revival, under congenial influences, of an ancient Aryan rite belonging originally to a period even earlier than the Veda. The ancient authorized ceremony looks as though, in a primitive form of the rite, the widow had been actually sent with the dead, for which real sacrifice a humaner law substituted a mere pretence. This view is supported by the existence of an old and express prohibition of the wife being sacrificed, a prohibition seemingly directed against a real custom, ‘to follow the dead husband is prohibited, so says the law of the Brahmans. With regard to the other castes this law for women may be or may not be.’[749]To treat the Hindu widow-burning as a case of survival and revival seems to me most in accordance with a general ethnographic view of the subject. Widow-sacrifice is found in various regions of the world under a low state of civilization, andthis fits with the hypothesis of its having belonged to the Aryan race while yet in an early and barbarous condition. Thus the prevalence of a rite of suttee like that of modern India among ancient Aryan nations settled in Europe, Greeks, Scandinavians, Germans, Slaves, may be simply accounted for by direct inheritance from the remote common antiquity of them all. If this theory be sound, it will follow that ancient as the Vedic ordinances may be, they represent in this matter a reform and a reaction against a yet more ancient barbaric rite of widow-sacrifice, which they prohibited in fact, but yet kept up in symbol. The history of religion displays but too plainly the proneness of mankind to relapse, in spite of reformation, into the lower and darker condition of the past. Stronger and more tenacious than even Vedic authority, the hideous custom of the suttee may have outlived an attempt to suppress it in early Brahmanic times, and the English rulers, in abolishing it, may have abolished a relic not merely of degenerate Hinduism, but of the far more remotely ancient savagery out of which the Aryan civilization had grown.
In now passing from the consideration of the souls of men to that of the souls of the lower animals, we have first to inform ourselves as to the savage man’s idea, which is very different from the civilized man’s, of the nature of these lower animals. A remarkable group of observances customary among rude tribes will bring this distinction sharply into view. Savages talk quite seriously to beasts alive or dead as they would to men alive or dead, offer them homage, ask pardon when it is their painful duty to hunt and kill them. A North American Indian will reason with a horse as if rational. Some will spare the rattlesnake, fearing the vengeance of its spirit if slain; others will salute the creature reverently, bid it welcome as a friend from the land of spirits, sprinkle a pinch of tobacco on its head for an offering, catch it by the tail and dispatch it with extreme dexterity, and carry off its skin as a trophy. If an Indian is attacked and torn by a bear, it is that thebeast fell upon him intentionally in anger, perhaps to revenge the hurt done to another bear. When a bear is killed, they will beg pardon of him, or even make him condone the offence by smoking the peace-pipe with his murderers, who put the pipe in his mouth and blow down it, begging his spirit not to take revenge.[750]So in Africa, the Kafirs will hunt the elephant, begging him not to tread on them and kill them, and when he is dead they will assure him that they did not kill him on purpose, and they will bury his trunk, for the elephant is a mighty chief, and his trunk is his hand that he may hurt withal. The Congo people will even avenge such a murder by a pretended attack on the hunters who did the deed.[751]Such customs are common among the lower Asiatic tribes. The Stiens of Kambodia ask pardon of the beast they have killed;[752]the Ainos of Yesso kill the bear, offer obeisance and salutation to him, and cut up his carcase.[753]The Koriaks, if they have slain a bear or wolf, will flay him, dress one of their people in the skin, and dance round him, chanting excuses that they did not do it, and especially laying the blame on a Russian. But if it is a fox, they take his skin, wrap his dead body in hay, and sneering tell him to go to his own people and say what famous hospitality he has had, and how they gave him a new coat instead of his old one.[754]The Samoyeds excuse themselves to the slain bear, telling him it was the Russians who did it, and that a Russian knife will cut him up.[755]The Goldi will set up the slain bear, call him ‘my lord’ and do ironical homage to him, or taking him alive will fatten him in a cage, call him ‘son’ and ‘brother,’ and kill and eat him as a sacrifice at a solemn festival.[756]In Borneo,the Dayaks, when they have caught an alligator with a baited hook and rope, address him with respect and soothing till they have his legs fast, and then mocking call him ‘rajah’ and ‘grandfather.’[757]Thus when the savage gets over his fears, he still keeps up in ironical merriment the reverence which had its origin in trembling sincerity. Even now the Norse hunter will say with horror of a bear that will attack man, that he can be ‘no Christian bear.’
The sense of an absolute psychical distinction between man and beast, so prevalent in the civilized world, is hardly to be found among the lower races. Men to whom the cries of beasts and birds seem like human language, and their actions guided as it were by human thought, logically enough allow the existence of souls to beasts, birds, and reptiles, as to men. The lower psychology cannot but recognize in beasts the very characteristics which it attributes to the human soul, namely, the phenomena of life and death, will and judgment, and the phantom seen in vision or in dream. As for believers, savage or civilized, in the great doctrine of metempsychosis, these not only consider that an animal may have a soul, but that this soul may have inhabited a human being, and thus the creature may be in fact their own ancestor or once familiar friend. A line of facts, arranged as waymarks along the course of civilization, will serve to indicate the history of opinion from savagery onward, as to the souls of animals during life and after death. North American Indians held every animal to have its spirit, and these spirits their future life; the soul of the Canadian dog went to serve his master in the other world; among the Sioux, the prerogative of having four souls was not confined to man, but belonged also to the bear, the most human of animals.[758]The Greenlanders considered that a sick human soul might be replaced by the sorcerer with a fresh healthy soul of a hare, a reindeer, or a youngchild.[759]Maori tale-tellers have heard of the road by which the spirits of dogs descend to Reinga, the Hades of the departed; the Hovas of Madagascar know that the ghosts of beasts and men, dwelling in a great mountain in the south called Ambondrombe, come out occasionally to walk among the tombs or execution-places of criminals.[760]The Kamchadals held that every creature, even the smallest fly, would live again in the under-world.[761]The Kukis of Assam think that the ghost of every animal a Kuki kills in the chase or for the feast will belong to him in the next life, even as the enemy he slays in the field will then become his slave. The Karens apply the doctrine of the spirit or personal life-phantom, which is apt to wander from the body and thus suffer injury, equally to men and to animals.[762]The Zulus say the cattle they kill come to life again, and become the property of the dwellers in the world beneath.[763]The Siamese butcher, when in defiance of the very principles of his Buddhism he slaughters an ox, before he kills the creature has at least the grace to beseech its spirit to seek a happier abode.[764]In connexion with such transmigration, Pythagorean and Platonic philosophy gives to the lower animals undying souls, while other classic opinion may recognize in beasts only an inferior order of soul, only the ‘anima’ but not the human ‘animus’ besides. Thus Juvenal: