§ 6. Ghosts and Spirits
Whilst of some tribes (for example the Indians of Guiana) it is said that there is nothing to indicate that they “know of any spirits, except such as are, or once were, situated in material bodies,”[198] amongst others we are often told that not only ghosts are known but also spirits that are declared never to have been incarnate. An extreme form of the ghost-theory maintains that all spirits were once ghosts whose incarnation has been forgotten; but this is needless, and seems not to be true. It is enough that probably the original inhabitants of the spirit-world were ghosts; that some of those now believed not to have been ghosts were once really so; and that those spirits that were never ghosts are later immigrants, who have obtained domicile by having been imagined in analogy with ghosts. The following list indicates more or less probable reasons why (A) ghosts have sometimes come to be regarded as non-human spirits, and (B) why certain non-human things have come to be regarded as spirits, or as possessed by spirits, more or less resembling the human.
A. Spirits that were formerly ghosts, but are now declared not to have been:
(a) Ghosts whose former life has been forgotten by mere lapse of time. The memory of the dead amongst many tribes does not extend beyond three or four generations. If then the ghost of some unusually impressive personality happens to be remembered, when all his relatives and contemporaries have been forgotten, he seems to be separated from the human race. And if his name was that of some natural object, his ghost, according to Spencer’s hypothesis, may now be regarded as the spirit of that phenomenon. But as to Spencer’s hypothesis,[199] although it gives such a plausible explanation of much nature-worship by real facts as to the working of savage language and thought that it seems to me unreasonable to doubt that it has had some of the effects he traces to it, yet it presses upon me more and more that most cases of nature-worship are to be explained by more particular causes.
(b) To dissociate a ghost from mankind is especially easy if his tomb has been forgotten, or if he has no tomb. As the drowned have no tombs, they easily become water-demons. Tombs must often be forgotten in consequence of migrations. In Central Melanesia both ghosts and spirits are recognised; but in the west worship is directed chiefly to ghosts, in the east chiefly to spirits. As migration has been from west to east, the tombs of ancestors can no longer be pointed out by the eastern islanders, and so their ghosts may have become spirits. In Tumloo (northern New Guinea) there are temples of spirits (all female) distinct from ancestral ghosts, and on the banisters of ladders leading up to these temples there are ornamental figures of ape-like animals; the architecture of the temples points to a former superior culture.[200] As there are no apes in New Guinea, these figures and temples may indicate a former residence under better conditions in Java or Borneo; and the spirits with which they are associated may be ancestral ghosts whose tombs and other earthly vestiges have been forgotten in the migration.
(c) We may see another way in which a ghost may become a pure spirit, if we suppose that as a ghost he had attained to some measure of worship, but that with the rise of new gods (by conquest, or by the reputation of being more helpful), or by his being himself too good to be worth worshipping, his rites have been neglected and his legend forgotten. Then he is no longer remembered as a ghost, or ancestor.
(d) It may be thought honourable to a god to deny that he was ever a man.
(e) The construction of a world-myth makes it necessary to begin somewhere with some one; and whoever becomes the first being, it is necessary to deny that he was ever begotten. But there may be inconsistent stories: the supreme being of the central Esquimo is a woman, Sedna, who created all things that have life; but other traditions give her a human origin.[201] Similarly, in drawing up the genealogy of ancestral gods, we come at last to one who was never begotten. Such is Unkulunkulu of the Zulus, generally said to have sprung from a bed of reeds.[202]
B. Spirits that were never incarnate, but have been imagined by analogy with ghosts already propitiated: