[62]. It is also true that the mysterious is often dreadful; even now in civilized lands there is a general fear of a 'ghost.' Precautions are taken by savages to drive or keep the soul away: the doors of houses are closed, and noises are made. On the other hand, ghosts, as members of the family or the clan, are often regarded as friendly.[125] Even during a man's lifetime his soul may be a sort of guide and protector—may attain, in fact, the rank of a deity;[126] and after death it may become, as ancestor, the object of a regular cult.
[63]. Fear of ghosts has, perhaps, suggested certain methods of disposing of the dead body, as by interring or exposing it at a distance from the village, or burning it or throwing it into the water; other considerations, however, as is suggested above,[127] may determine, in whole or in part, these methods of dealing with the body.
[64]. 3. It may be considered an advance in the organization of the future life when the soul is supposed to go to some distant place on the earth or in the sea or in the sky.[128] This is an attempt to separate the spheres of the living and the dead, and thus at once to define the functions of the dead and relieve the living from the fear of them. The land of the dead is sometimes vaguely spoken of as lying on earth, far off in some direction not precisely defined—east, west, north, or south—in accordance with traditions whose origin is lost in the obscurity of the past.
[65]. Possibly in some cases it is the traditional original home of the tribe;[129] more often, it would seem, some local or astronomical fact has given the suggestion of the place; one Egyptian view was that the western desert (a wide mysterious region) was the abode of the departed; it was a widespread belief that the dead went to where the sun disappeared beneath the horizon.[130] Tribes living near the sea or a river often place the other world beyond the sea or the river,[131] and a ferryman is sometimes imagined who sets souls over the water.[132] Mountains also are regarded as abodes of the dead.[133] It is not unnatural that the abodes of departed souls should be placed in the sky, whose height and brightness, with its crowd of luminous bodies, made it an object of wonder and awe, and caused it to be regarded as the dwelling place of the happy gods, with whom deserving men would naturally be. Sometimes the expanse of the upper air was regarded as the home of souls (as in Samoa), sometimes a heavenly body—the sun (in India), or the moon (in the Bowditch Islands), or the stars.[134] The schemes being vague, several of these conceptions may exist side by side at the same place and time.
[66]. The occupations of the dead in these regions are held usually to be the same as those of the living; no other view is possible in early stages of social life. Generally all the apparatus of earthly life (food, utensils, weapons) is placed on the grave or with the body, and wives and slaves are slain to be the companions of the deceased.
[67]. 4. A more decided separation between the living and the dead is made in the conception of the underground world as the abode of the latter. It was, however, only at a late period that this conception was carried far enough to make the separation effective. Among the Central Australians there were folk-stories of early men who traveled under the ground, but this is represented as merely an extraordinary way of getting from one place to another on the surface of the earth. Some North American tribes tell of an underground world inhabited by the ants and by beings similar to man, but those who live up on the earth are seen there only by accident, as when some hero dares the descent.[135] The conception of a real subterranean or submarine hades is found, however, among many savage and barbarous peoples, as the Samoans, the inhabitants of New Guinea, the Zulus, the Navahos, the Eskimo, the Kafirs of the Hindu Kush, and others.[136]
[68]. These pictures of the future world are crude, and usually stand side by side with others; they are experiments in eschatology. But the constructive imagination moved more and more toward an organized underground hades as the sole abode of the dead—the place to which all the dead go. Such a hades is found among the civilized peoples of antiquity, Egyptians, Semites, Hindus, Greeks, and Romans, and, in more recent times, among the Teutons (Scandinavians). The suggestion for this position may have come from the grave (though it does not appear that the grave was regarded as the permanent abode of the dead), and from caverns that seemed to lead down into the bowels of the earth. The descent of souls into a subterranean world offered no difficulties to early imagination: ghosts, like the Australian ancestors, could move freely where living men could not go; where there was no cavern like that by which Æneas passed below,[137] they could pass through the ground.
[69]. A lower region offered a wide land for the departed, with the possibility of organization of its denizens. Ghosts gradually lost their importance as a factor in everyday life; sights and sounds that had been referred to wandering souls came to be explained by natural laws. Wider geographical knowledge made it difficult to assign the ghosts a mundane home, and led to their relegation to the sub-mundane region. Further, the establishment of great nations familiarized men with the idea that every large community should have its own domain. The gods were gradually massed, first in the sky, the ocean, and hades, and then in heaven. For the dead the first organization (if that term may be allowed) was in hades; the separation into heaven and hell came later. A specific divine head of the Underworld is found in Egypt, Babylonia and Assyria, India, Greece, Rome, but not in Israel. Such a definite system of government could exist only when something approaching a pantheon had been established; the Babylonians, for example, whose pantheon was vague, had also a vague god of hades.
[70]. Theories of the occupations of the dead varied in the early civilized stage, before the rise of the idea of ethical retribution in the other life. In the absence of earthly relations, imagination could conceive of nothing for them to do, and hence an ardent desire for the continuance of earthly life.[138] For the Hebrews the Underworld was without pursuits; the shades sat motionless, in the dress and according to the rank of the upper world, without emotions or aims (except a sparkle of malicious satisfaction when some great man came down from earth), and without religious worship.[139] A similar view was held by the Greeks and the Romans. Certain Egyptian documents speak of mundane occupations for the dead, but these documents belong to a comparatively late stage of culture, and what the earlier view was we do not know.[140] Of Hindu ideas, also, on this point we have only relatively late notices.
[71]. 5. A radical transformation in the conception of the state of the dead was effected by the introduction of the idea of moral retribution into the life of the Underworld.[141] The basis of the movement was the natural conception of life as determined by ethical considerations, but the process of transformation has extended over thousands of years and has hardly yet reached its completion. In the lowest eschatological systems known to us there is no marked difference in the status of departed souls; so among the Central Australians, the tribes of New Guinea and the Torres Straits islands, the Zulus, the Malagasy, the West African peoples, and some North American tribes.[142]