“It is a modest creed and yet
Pleasant if one considers it,
To own that death itself must be
Like all the rest, a mockery.”
It is a creed which springs from the very instinct of life. Two pelicans returning to their nest found their two young ones dead from sunstroke. The careful observer who was watching them has recorded that they did not seem to recognise the inert, fluffy heap as what was their fledglings; they hunted for them for a long while, moving the twigs of the nest, and at last threw one of the dead birds out of it. So the primitive man in presence of the dead knows that this is not he and he begins to ask: where is he?
But if every race in turn has asked that question, it was asked with more insistence by some peoples than by others, and above all, it was answered by some with more assurance. The Neolithic Turanians had nothing misty in their vision of another world. It was full of movement and variety: the chase, the battle, the feast, sleep and awakening, night and day—these were there as well as here. Animals were essential to the picture, and it never struck the Neolithic man that there was any more difficulty about their living again than about his living again. If he philosophised at all, it was probably after the fashion of the Eskimo who holds the soul to be the “owner” of the body: the body, the flesh, dies and may be devoured, but he who kills the body does not kill its “owner.”
Vast numbers of bones have been found near the dolmens in Southern France. The steed of the dead man galloped with him into the Beyond. The faithful dog trotted by the little child, comrade and guardian. In the exquisite Hebrew idyll Tobias has his dog as well as the angel to accompany him on his adventurous earthly journey. The little Neolithic boy had only the dog and his journey was longer; but to some grieving fathers would it not be a rare comfort to imagine their lost darlings guarded by loving four-footed friends along the Path of Souls?
The Celtic conquerors of the dolmen-builders took most of their religious ideas. When successful aid in mundane matters was what was chiefly sought in religion, a little thing might determine conversion en masse. If the divinities of one set of people seemed on some occasion powerless, it was natural to try the divinities of somebody else. When success crowned the experiment, the new worship was formally adopted. This is exactly what happened in the historic case of Clovis and “Clothilde’s God,” and it doubtless happened frequently before the dawn of history. Druidism is believed to have arisen in this way in a grafting of the new on the old. The Celts had the same views about the next world as the dolmen-builders. They are thought to have taken them from the conquered with the rest of their religious system, but to me it seems unlikely that they had not already similar views when they arrived from Asia. In the early Vedas goats and horses were sacrificed to go before and announce the coming of the dead; Vedic animals kept their forms, the renewed body was perfect and incorruptible, but it was the real body. A celebrated racehorse was deified after death. Such beliefs have a strong affinity to the theory that animals (or slaves) killed at the man’s funeral will be useful to him in the after-life. However derived, our European ancestors embraced that theory to the full.
Only a few years ago a second Viking ship was found at Oseberg, in Norway, in which were the remains of ten horses, four dogs, a young ox, and the head of an old ox. Three more horses were found outside. The dogs had on their own collars with long chains. There were also sledges with elaborately carved animals’ heads. It was a queen’s grave; her distaff and spinning-wheel told of simple womanly tasks amidst so much sepulchral splendour. In those late times the law by which religious forms grow more sumptuous as the faith behind them grows less, may have come into operation. Lavish but meaningless tributes may have taken the place of a provision full of meaning for real wants.
So the sacrifices to the gods may have been once intended to stock the pastures of heaven. It cannot be doubted that the victim was never killed in the mind of the original sacrificer, it was merely transferred to another sphere. The worser barbarity comes in when the true significance of the act is lost and when it is repeated from habit.