(c) Animals that are important prey to a hunting tribe are often believed to have ghosts that may be hunted by dead tribesmen; or that must be propitiated when one of them is slain: the ghosts, for example, of seals and bears are bribed by the Esquimo to entice other seals and bears to come and be killed. A seal desires above everything, they say, a drink of fresh water; so as soon as one is brought ashore a dipperful is poured into his mouth; else the other seals will not allow themselves to be caught. The polar bear (male) desires crooked knives and bow-drills, or (female) women’s knives and needle-cases. Hence, when a bear is killed, its ghost accompanies its skin into the hunter’s hut; and the skin is hung up with the appropriate tools for four or five days. Then the bear-ghost is driven out by a magic formula, takes with it the souls of the tools, and reports well of the hunter in bear-soul land. Whilst in the hut, as an honoured guest, nothing is done that it dislikes in human customs.[193]
(d) In the development of mythology, animals and monsters of various kinds may be found inhabiting shadow-land; but these are not true ghosts of any particular things that once died in this world.
This list of the ways in which animals may come to have ghosts is not offered as exhausting all the cases.
§ 5. Ghosts and Soul-stuff
A ghost is a disembodied soul, having a consciousness and power at, or generally (because it is feared) above, the human level; but there may be disembodied souls, or souls capable of disembodiment, that have no consciousness, or none above the level of Animatism. Even if a living thing have a consciousness, its post-mortem apparition may not; like the Banks’ Islanders’ pig, which, though “a distinguished animal and acknowledged to be intelligent,” has no true ghost. Among nearly all tribes, whatever is offered in sacrifice to gods or left in, or at, the tombs of men deceased, is believed to have some sort of soul; because, plainly, spirits do not eat or consume the visible food or utensils; yet it is necessary to the success of the rites to suppose that the spirits are satisfied; they must, therefore, take the souls of the offerings. And what can be more plausible reasoning than to argue that, as solid men eat solid food, ghosts eat ghostly food? “Soul” thus appears as a sort of ghost-substance, or ghost-body. For, in dreams, the departed are seen as if in the flesh; and moreover analogy requires that the ghost consciousness and ghost-force shall have a body of some sort, and, of course, one that will maintain in ghost-land the same relations to other things that the mortal body did in this world. In ghost-land, or shadow-land, or dream-land, the substance of all things is this soul-stuff. Sometimes the force of analogy requires a tribe to believe that, in order that the souls of things (such as earthen pots or weapons) may be released to accompany a ghost to the underworld, the things themselves must be “killed,” that is to say, broken; but other tribes are not such consistent logicians; and in some cases where things left exposed at a grave (not buried) are broken, it may be to prevent their being stolen.
Anything, then, may have “soul” after its kind: relatively inert things have relatively inert souls, but never true ghosts; some animals may have ghosts, especially if they have attained to a certain individuality, but generally only in so far as they are imagined to attend upon human ghosts or spirits. Inasmuch as the word “soul” is often used as equivalent to “ghost,” it would be convenient always to speak of the soul which is ghost-food, or ghost-body, “as soul-stuff.”[194] Soul-stuff is conceived of as material, though subtle and normally invisible. A man’s soul-stuff may be regarded not only as permeating his body, but also as infecting everything he possesses or touches: no doubt by analogy with his odour; for a man’s odour is a personal quality, distinguishable by dogs and (I believe) by some savages and hypnotic subjects; and the stench of his putrefying corpse may be supposed to convey his courage and skill to those who inhale it.[195] And the savour of a burnt-offering is food for gods. Indeed, Ellis says explicitly that, in Tahiti, food was put to the mouth of a chieftain’s corpse; because, they said, there was a spiritual as well as a material part of food, a part which they could smell.[196]
Savage ideas are generally so little thought out, and are so irregularly thought out by different tribes, that the relation of a thing to its soul-stuff varies widely from one tribe to another. In many cases the extraction by ghost or god of the soul-stuff from an offering may affect it so little, that the devotee or the priest proceeds to feast upon it; and I have nowhere met with the notion (which logic requires) that such metaphysically eviscerated food can only nourish a man’s body and not his soul. However, since the eating of the sacrifice may be an act of communion with the ghost, he then naturally extracts the goodness only from his own share. In other cases, the breaking of weapons and utensils buried with a corpse implies an intimate unity between the wholeness of an object and its soul-stuff; and the Rev. J. H. Weeks says of the considerable wealth put into a grave by the Bakongo, that only the shell or semblance of anything is supposed to remain there.[197]
This conception of soul-stuff may have been an important contribution to metaphysics. The doctrine of material substance is reached by abstracting all the qualities of things; but then there would be nothing left, were it not for this venerable idea of something invisible and intangible in things in which qualities may “inhere,” or which may serve as a “support” to them; so that, when it is taken away there is only a shell or semblance of anything left. But such a tenet is uncommon. Along another line of speculation this soul-stuff may become the Soul of the World. When by philosophers spirits are no longer conceived to have bodies, but to be the very opposite of bodies, a spiritual substance must be invented to support their qualities, in order to put them upon an equal footing of reality with corporeal things; but as there is no spirit-stuff ready made by the wisdom of our forefathers, this concept remains uncomfortably empty. To appear as ghosts and to have mechanical energy, spirits may be invested with “soul-stuff” as a spiritual body; but this is only subtle matter. Their own substance must be correlative with their proper attributes as pure conscious beings, the very opposite of bodies; and, therefore, immaterial, unextended, simple, self-identical, according to the “paralogisms of Rational Psychology.” But such speculations are confined to philosophers and theologians: some of whom, however, maintain (as if reverting to the original savage idea) that spirit is the true substance of material things, at least that material things depend upon a spirit, or spirits, for their existence. Monists, again, say there is one substance of both matter and mind, which is not either of these any more than it is the other. Locke very honestly calls it “a supposed I know not what.”
In writing of Magic, I have indicated the origin of the notion of force; and if my view is justifiable, it appears that those celebrated abstractions “force” and “matter,” form and substance, spirit and body, may be traced to the savage mind. That savages are incapable of general and abstract ideas we have seen to be an illusion. They are necessary to economy in the organisation of the mind. When a tribe bases its grammatical gender on the distinction of Animate and Inanimate, has it in no sense corresponding ideas? But an abstract idea results from a long process of dissociative growth from its concrete sources, and must exist in some manner at all stages of that growth, before its distinctness is completed by an appropriate name; and it is reasonable to suppose that at every stage of growth it functions and influences the course of thought. Accordingly, it is plain that from very early times thought has been greatly influenced by ideas of force, form, spirit and the rest of them.