The Origin of Man and of His Superstitions

by Carveth Read

That the ghost theory arises not only from dreams, but is also suggested by hallucinations and hypnagogic visions is very probable. In various parts of the world savages have been described as having visions of remarkably coherent and convincing vividness that seem not to have been dreams.[180] But such experiences, even when artificially induced by fasting or drugs (as happens among many tribes), are rare in comparison with dreams; and to the influence of dreams upon these savage beliefs there is abundant testimony. With some tribes dreams are treated as part of their objective experience; so that to be injured by your neighbour in a dream is just ground for avenging yourself as soon as you wake; and to see a dead man in a dream is, therefore, clear proof of his continued existence, and that either he has come to the dreamer or the dreamer has gone to visit him.

Thus Sir Everard im Thurn says of the native of Guiana, his dreams are as real as any events of his waking life; his dream-actions are done by his spirit: in dreams he continues to see the dead—that is, their spirits.[181] Similarly, the Lengua Indians (W. of R. Paragua) have great faith in dreams; wherein the spirit is believed to leave the body and to do in fact what is dreamed.[182] According to the Cherokees, to dream of being bitten by a snake requires the same treatment as actual snake-bite; else (perhaps years later) the same inflammation will appear in the wounded spot, with the same consequences.[183] The Motu hold that sua (ghosts or spirits) are seen in dreams, and that when a man sleeps his own sua leaves his body.[184] “The Lifuans believe in the reality of what is seen in a dream, and are influenced by it. Their dead ancestors appeared in dreams.”[185] And the Polynesians of Manatuki thought that “dreams were occasioned by the spirit going to the places seen in them.”[186] Many more of such witnesses might be cited.

It is recognised by psychologists that dreams, as immediate experience, have more the character of perception than of imagination. Children are apt to confuse dreams with reality. It can only have been gradually, with the growing knowledge of continuity and coherence in the course of events, and therewith the demand for corroboration of testimony, that dreams were distinguished from the waking life. When no longer supposed to be all of them real, some are still so regarded: the Dieri, amongst lower savages, distinguish between visions, as revelations made by Kutchi (an evil Spirit), and ordinary dreams, as mere fancies.[187] But so impressive are dreams to many people, in their eagerness to know more than sense and philosophy can tell them, that they persist in hoping, and therefore believing, that dreams, if they give no knowledge of this world, may still be revelations of another, perhaps more real; or if not revelations, adumbrations by way of allegory, which some learned or inspired Daniel may interpret; or, at least, omens of good or evil, which the ancient science of Oneiromancy undertakes to explain. There is now a new and more promising Oneiromancy that interprets dreams as indicating not the future, but one’s own past, chiefly a forgotten past, and teaches to know oneself: more promising; for what but experience can possibly be the source of dreams—at least, of dream-elements? Some of the new principles of interpretation, however, may compare for obscurity with the ancient.

That the dead are seen alive in dreams is, then, for the savage a fact of observation; and, therefore, the continued existence of the dead is, for him, not in the first place supernatural; although it may be called hyperphysical, because it is experienced only in dreams and not by daylight, and is exempt from ordinary conditions of time and place. But it gradually becomes supernatural, as the capricious incidents of dream-life are felt to be “uncanny,” as that which occurs only at night is involved in the fears of the night, and as a great cloud of imaginations accumulates about the dead and obscures the simple facts of dream-perception in which the belief originated. This cloud of imaginations, by its mysterious character and by various alliances with Magic, spreads and deepens until it overshadows the whole of human life; is generally, indeed, dispersed here and there by the forces of biological necessity, often by subterfuges laughable enough; which have, however, the merit of saving mankind from destruction: but sometimes it extinguishes the last ray of common sense, impoverishes the believer, enfeebles him, fills his days and nights with terror, gives him over to practices the most cruel or the most disgusting, leads him to slay his own tribesmen, his own children, his own parents, and to offer up himself in the sure hope of resurrection.

§ 4. Extension of the Ghost Theory to Animals

Spirits, having once been conceived of as explaining the actions of men and surviving their bodily death, may by analogy be conceived to explain the action of any other things in circumstances that suggest a motive for the action, and therefore to possess or inhabit such things, and to be capable of separating from them, like ghosts. Other things are already, by Magic and Animatism, force-things, in some degree conscious, whose forces may be capable of acting invisibly at a distance; and at the death of a man it is his conscious force that leaves the body and becomes a ghost. Since, then, there is hardly any natural object whose action may not in some circumstances seem to be interpretable by motives, especially amongst a timid and suspicious people, how can we assign any necessary limits to the spread of Animism? Moreover, the causes most influential in establishing the ghost theory for man directly require its extension to other things. For not human beings only are seen in dreams, but also their clothes, weapons and utensils, and also animals, plants, localities. If, then, the dead, because they are seen in dreams, are inferred still to live under conditions in which they are not visible by daylight to ordinary men, how can the inference be avoided that all sorts of things, artefacts, animals, plants, localities, share in that mode of existence—that all have their doubles? And “Why not?” the savage might ask, since it is literally true of all things, without exception, that they are sometimes visible, sometimes invisible.[188] Similar inferences seem to be justifiable from the alliance of ghosts with shadows and reflections, and the fact that not man only but everything else has a shadow and a reflection, and that their shadows and reflections disappear at night, just when the things themselves sometimes appear in dreams. Moreover, so far as the breath, the pulse, the shining of the eye, which cease in the human corpse, are sometimes identified with the departed spirit, the same processes likewise cease at the death of animals; though, it is true, there is here no analogy with inanimate things, and the breathing and circulation of plants are beyond the savage’s observation. Therefore, although Animism is an inferential construction, were the construction entirely due to the logic of analogy, there would be nothing surprising in the discovery that the belief “that everything has a ghost” is just as universal and uniform in the human race as if it had been an innate or primitive belief. That, on the contrary, Animism prevails very irregularly amongst the tribes of men; that, in all directions, inferences that are analogically specious fail to be drawn; that instead of a general system of Animism every tribe has its own Animism; this is surprising and needs to be explained. The extension of the theory is easier to understand than its irregular limitation.

Bearing in mind that we are at present considering Animism as a belief in ghosts, not in spirits generally (to which we shall come in Sec. 6), I venture to think that, although dreams, shadows and reflections certainly suggest a double existence of everything, yet savages never assign a true ghost to anything inanimate, nor to plants, nor even to animals, unless there is a special reason for doing so; because only in the case of human beings is the suggestion interesting enough to take hold of the social imagination. Hence, even though other things appear in the ghost-world, they have no significance there, except in relation to human ghosts (or ghostlike spirits) on whom they attend. Accordingly, human ghosts have a place in the beliefs of every tribe, because human beings excite affection, admiration and fear, have well-marked individuality; are therefore remembered and have stories told of them; and if they are seen after death, it is, of course, reported. The evidence makes it only too plain that the paralysis of attention by fear is the chief (though not the only) emotional factor of belief in ghosts; and what other thing in all nature is to be feared in comparison with one’s fellow-man?

The belief in ghosts, escaped and roaming independent of any normally visible body, as a social belief, is involved in the practice of reporting and discussing dreams, which becomes the same thing as telling ghost-stories—the first and most persistent motive of literature. Stories can only be told effectively of things generally interesting; and, at first, such things must have been recognisable by the hearers and must have had some individuality. Hence—

(a) Animals that attain to such individuality may have ghosts: (i) An animal that occasions widespread fear, such as a man-eating tiger. We must distinguish from such cases the frequent beliefs that tigers, wolves, sharks, snakes, etc., are, or are possessed by, the spirits or ghosts of men. (ii) An animal that comes to be upon terms of special intimacy with men; such as the very tame dogs and pigs that come when they are called among the Bakongo;[189] or hunting dogs that have been specially doctored among the Baloki.[190]

(b) Animals slain at funeral feasts to accompany the dead have ghosts so far as necessary for that purpose; but, wanting individuality and personal interest, they make no further figure in ghost-lore; they do not “walk” or revisit the glimpses of the moon. Thus the Tanghouls say that ghosts, on reaching Kazairam (their Hades), find the gates barred against them by the deity Kokto; so at the burial feast of a rich man a buffalo is killed, that his mighty ghost may burst open the massive gates of that abode. Poor ghosts must wait about outside, till a rich one comes up with his buffalo; when they all rush in behind him.[191] But we hear nothing further of the buffalo. In the Banks’ Islands, pigs killed at a funeral feast have no true ghosts to follow the dead to Panoi, but only a sort of wraith; because they only go for show, that their master may be well received there.[192]