The Origin of Death
Civilised man in a scientific age would never invent a myth to account for ‘God’s great ordinance of death.’ He regards it as a fact, obvious and necessarily universal; but his own children have not attained to his belief in death. The certainty and universality of death do not enter into the thoughts of our little ones.
For in the thought of immortality
Do children play about the flowery meads.
Now, there are still many childlike tribes of men who practically disbelieve in death. To them death is always a surprise and an accident—an unnecessary, irrelevant intrusion on the living world. ‘Natural deaths are by many tribes regarded as supernatural,’ says Dr. Tylor. These tribes have no conception of death as the inevitable, eventual obstruction and cessation of the powers of the bodily machine; the stopping of the pulses and processes of life by violence or decay or disease. To persons who regard Death thus, his intrusion into the world (for Death, of course, is thought to be a person) stands in great need of explanation. That explanation, as usual, is given in myths.