The Origin of Man and of His Superstitions

by Carveth Read

“the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the streets of Rome.”

Spirits may have all the appurtenances of an animal body; for two of them waylaid an Australian, and made a wizard of him by taking out his entrails and filling up the cavity with the entrails of one of themselves.[213] They may marry mortals, as a devil begat Caliban upon a witch; and not long ago the “incubus” was very troublesome throughout Europe. In short, a ghost or spirit can act physically, just as a man can, because he has the same organs; but with greater power, because mysterious and more feared. And such beliefs persist amongst people whose culture is much higher than the Australian, as in Jacob’s wrestling with something at the ford Jabbok, and Grettir’s slaying of the ghost of Glam at Thorhallstad;[214] and Euthymus, the boxer, having put on his armour, defeated the ghost of Lycas at Temesa.[215] To this day, in Macedonia, there are vampires, or animated corpses (chiefly Turks), that walk, and throttle people and suck their blood.[216] “The Moslem corpse,” says R. Burton, “is partly sentient in the tomb.”[217] The Karok of California consider it the highest crime to utter the name of the dead; for it makes the mouldering skeleton turn in its grave and groan.[218] In fact, it is difficult to think of one’s own future corpse as entirely inanimate, and this adds some discomfort to one’s thoughts of death. According to Wundt, the Körperseele, as eine Eigenschaft des lebenden Körpers, is a starting-point of Animism independent of, and probably prior to, the breath and the dream, which suggest the idea of a free separable soul.[219] This confusion of ideas in popular Animism seems to me due to (1) the strong association of the ghost with the corpse, and the performance of rites (which must take place somewhere, if at all) naturally at the grave or in connection with relics; (2) the manifestation of ghosts as visible, speaking, tangible bodies in dreams; (3) the difficulty of imagining spirits to live and act except in the likeness of the body (though non-human forms—usually animal—are sometimes substituted); (4) the convenience of such imaginations to the story-teller; (5) the convenience of them to sorcerers and purveyors of mysteries, who rely upon such imaginations in producing illusion by suggestion. For ages a confusion of ghost with corpse may exist in the popular mind along with the more refined notion of soul-stuff in which a ghost becomes manifest, whilst there is no attempt to reconcile these imaginations; and it is only by metaphysical subtilties about “mind” and “matter,” or by mystical aversion to sensuosity, that the notion of pure incorporeal spirit without even spatial limitations is at last freed from these primitive associations, partially and amongst a few people. A tendency to abstract conception of the spirit is set up, indeed, in the ordinary way of “dissociation” by the belief in transmigration. For if a spirit may “possess” all sorts of bodies—men, plants, animals, etc.—it is independent of any particular body; though it may still be thought to need some body. Where the idea of pure spirit has been established amongst educated people, it becomes necessary for those who believe in ghosts and have forgotten their soul-stuff to explain how a spirit can manifest itself to eye, ear, nose, hand, without a physical body, by “materialising” itself, as invisible vapour (say one’s own breath on a frosty morning) condenses into a cloud or into dew; for the power of analogy as an aid to thought, or as a substitute for it, is not yet exhausted.

The varieties of belief that occur here and there in the world cannot be explained without a much fuller knowledge of local circumstances than is usually available. The Semang say that souls are red, like blood, and no bigger than a grain of maize;[220] the Malays that they are vapoury, shadowy, filmy essences, about as big as one’s thumb;[221] in both cases shaped like the owner. Elsewhere in the Indian Archipelago, “the animating principle is conceived of, not as a tiny being confined to a single part of the body, but as a sort of fluid or ether diffused through every part.”[222] The less educated classes in Japan consider the soul as a small, round, black thing that can leave the body during sleep.[223] Amongst the Ekoi, the soul is a small thing dwelling in the breast, whilst a man lives; but at death expands into the body’s full stature.[224] The difficulty of finding the soul in the body leads some thinkers to suppose it must be very small, others very attenuated—thin as a shadow and as breath invisible.

Whilst many savages believe, like ourselves, that the body entertains one soul and gives up one ghost, the Ekoi believe in two, one animating a man’s body, the other possessing, or changing into, some animal in the bush. Three souls, the vegetative, sensitive and rational, are well known to European philosophy. The Mandans thought that a man has one black, one brown, and one light-coloured soul; but that only the last returned to the Lord of Life.[225] The observer who tells us this also reports (p. 484) that some of the Dakotas assign to each man four spirits: one that dies with the body; one that remains with, or near, it; one that accounts for its deeds and at death goes to the spirit-world; and one that lingers with the small bundle of the deceased’s hair, which is kept by relatives until they can throw it into an enemy’s country to become a roving, hostile demon. In West Africa, too, Miss Kingsley found four souls: one that survives the body; one that lives with some animal in the bush; one, the body’s shadow, that lies down every night in the shadow of the great god, and there recovers its strength; and, finally, the dream-soul. Some natives hold that the three last are functions of the first or true soul; but the witch-doctor treats all four separately.[226] The shadow of a man, his reflection, his name, his totem, his breath, his dream-wraith, his blood, his corpse, supply natural starting-points for such speculations. Some Chinese philosophers held that “each of the five viscera has its own separate male soul.”[227] I have found no belief in six souls; but in Siberia the Altaians distinguish six parts or (rather) conditions or stages of the soul; and this probably is only another attempt to convey the same meaning.[228] Mr. Skeat reports that, probably, in the old Animism of the Malays, each man had seven souls; though now they talk of only one; except in using spells, when the souls are addressed separately.[229] In the religion of Osiris there seems to have been a still greater number of souls: as of the name, the shape, the strength, the shadow, etc.: all reuniting with the immortal counterpart of a man’s mummy, if justified at the last judgment. Prof. Wiedemann suggests that these beliefs may have been collected from different local sources, and preserved for fear of losing anything that might be true.[230] Whereas, then, the prescientific mind is often accused of confusing things that are separate, we see here the opposite tendency to reify abstract aspects, and to separate things that are in nature united; and one probable cause of this is the practical interest of treating, and therefore of attending to and addressing, separately, certain aspects of a man in rites of exorcism, lustration, summoning, reinforcing, propitiation.

The belief in an external soul that exists apart from oneself (though identified with oneself for good or evil) in an animal, in the bush, or where not, may have arisen from the connecting of the soul with the shadow or reflection. The shadow is, indeed, attached to a man by the feet (except when he leaps), if the whole is seen; but it goes away at night: it stretches, as the sun declines, far across the plain, and then disappears. The reflection is quite separate, and is seen within a pool (as in a mirror), not on the surface, approaching us when we advance, and withdrawing when we retire: whence it is easy to understand that to take a man’s photograph may be to take away his soul. If this kind of soul may be some feet distant, why may it not be much further off, if there be any motive (such as the desire of secrecy) to wish or think it so? If it may reside within a pool, why not within anything else? What, in fact, becomes of it when we turn away? That it should be in an animal in the bush is reasonable enough, if one’s Totem (even though imperfectly remembered as such) is an animal in the bush, and if oneself is in some sort that animal.

§ 8. Origin and Destiny of Souls

Beliefs as to the origin of souls sometimes bear the character of fanciful explanation myths. The Semang say that souls grow upon a soul-tree in the world of Kari (their chief god); whence they are brought by birds, which are killed and eaten by an expectant mother: souls of fishes and animals are also obtained by the mothers’ eating certain fungi and grasses.[231] Here the analogy of the growth of fruits is adopted: being so familiar as to need no further explanation. Leibnitz’s suggestion that monads are fulgurations continuelles de la Divinité,[232] is at about the same level of thought. In other cases, we see the struggling to birth of ideas that still seem plausible: such is the widespread tenet that every present human soul is the reincarnation of an ancestor, which we find in Australia, Melanesia, Borneo, Manipur, on the Congo, in North America and elsewhere. The Bakongo seem to base their belief in reincarnation partly on personal resemblance; upon which ground a child may be thought to have the soul even of a living man; so that to point out such a resemblance is displeasing, since it implies that, the child having his soul, he must soon die.[233] Another reason they give for their belief is that the child speaks early of things its mother has not taught it, and that this must be due to an old soul talking in a new body. But Bakongo albinos are incarnations of water-spirits, and greatly feared. Possibly in some cases people began by naming children after their ancestors, and later inferred that those who bore the same name must be the same persons. Plato thought that, by a sort of law of psychic conservation, there must always be the same number of souls in the world:[234] there must, therefore, be reincarnation. That nothing absolutely begins to be, or perishes, though first explicit in the Ionian philosophy, is generally assumed in savage thinking; so why should it not be true of souls?

As to the destiny of souls there seems to exist amongst the tribes of men even greater variety of belief than as to their origin. They may pass through more than one stage of development: as in the western isles of Torres Straits one becomes at death, first a mari, and later a markai with a more definite status;[235] or as with the Veddas, one is at first called, without much confidence, “the living one,” and only a few days later becomes, after trial of one’s virtue, a yaka,[236] or authentic ghost. Often the dead will be reincarnated, but the interval between death and rebirth may be passed in an underworld, or in a city in the forest, or indefinitely in a land of ancestors. They may turn into plants; as among the Mafulu old people’s ghosts become large funguses growing in the mountains:[237] but more frequently into animals; perhaps their Totems, or (with seeming caprice) into such things as termites or wild pigs; or (because wings seem to suit the spirit) into a butterfly or bee; or into owls or bats that haunt the night and dwell in caves that may be tombs; or into deer or bear-cats, because these are seen in the clearings near tombs; or into snakes, because these are seen to come out of tombs, and often come into huts as if returning to their homes, and, moreover, cast their skins and so typify the renewal of life. They may also become stars, or shooting stars, or mere naked demons, or white men.