[72]. The earliest grounds of distinction are ritualistic and social; these occur among the higher savages and survive in some civilized peoples. The Fijians assign punishment in the other world to bachelors, men unaccompanied by their wives and children, cowards, and untattooed women.[143] Where circumcision was a tribal mark, the uncircumcised, as having no social status, were consigned to inferior places in hades: so among the Hebrews.[144] The omission of proper funeral ceremonies was held in like manner to entail deprivation of privilege in hades: the shade had an undesirable place below, as among the Babylonians and the Hebrews,[145] or was unable to enter the abode of the dead, and wandered forlorn on the earth or on the border of the Underworld, as was the Greek belief.[146] Exposure of the corpse to beasts and birds, making funeral ceremonies impossible, was regarded as a terrible misfortune for the dead.[147]
[73]. Such of these beliefs as relate to violations of ritual appear to spring from the view that the tribal customs are sacred, and from the consequent distinction between tribesmen and foreigners. All persons without the tribal mark were shut out from the privileges of the tribe, were outlaws in this world and the next; and those whose bodies were not properly disposed of lost the support of the tribal deities or of the subterranean Powers.[148] It was also held that the body retained the form in which it went down to hades;[149] hence the widespread dread of mutilation, as among the Chinese still. On the other hand the brave were rewarded.[150]
[74]. Sometimes earthly rank determines future conditions—a natural corollary to what is stated above (§72 f.). A distinction is made between nobles and common people in the Bowditch Islands.[151] The members of the Fijian Areoi Society are held to enjoy special privileges in the other world.[152] The belief in the Marquesas Islands is that the sky is for high gods and nobles.[153] According to John Smith, in savage Virginia only nobles and priests were supposed to survive after death.[154] The North American Mandans (of Dakota), according to one view, assign to the brave in the hereafter the delightful villages of the gods.[155] When souls are supposed to enter into animals different animals are assigned to nobles and common men.[156] Kings and nobles retain their superiority of position and are sometimes attended by their slaves and officers.[157]
[75]. The manner of death is sometimes significant. The Karens hold that persons killed by elephants, famine, or sword, do not enter the abode of the dead, but wander on the earth and take possession of the souls of men.[158] In Borneo it is supposed that those who are killed in war become specters.[159] The belief in the Marquesas Islands is that warriors dying in battle, women dying in childbirth, and suicides go up to the sky.[160] In regard to certain modes of death opposite opinions are held in the Ladrone (Marianne) Islands and the Hervey group: in the former those who die by violence are supposed to be tortured by demons, those who die a natural death are believed to be happy; according to the view in the latter group these last are devoured by the goddess of death, and the others are happy. In the one case violent death, it would seem, is supposed to be due to the anger of the gods, and to be a sign of something bad in the man; in the other case happiness is compensation for the misfortune of a violent death, and natural death, being the fate of ordinary people, leaves one at the mercy of the mistress of the other world.
[76]. The advance to the conception of moral retribution hereafter could take place only in communities in which earthly life was organized on a moral basis. The beginning of the movement is seen in certain savage tribes. Savages have their codes, which generally recognize some ethical virtues among the tribal obligations. Stealing, lying, failure in hospitality, cowardice, violation of marital rights—in general, all the acts that affect injuriously the communal life—are, as a rule, condemned by the common sense of the lowest peoples, and the moral character of the gods reflects that of their worshipers. By reason of the sense of solidarity the faults of individuals affect not only themselves but also their communities, and the gods care for communities as well as for individuals. Whenever, then, there is an inquest in the other world, these faults, it is likely, will be punished. On account of the paucity of our information, it is not possible to make a general statement on this point, but examples of future moral control occur in many savage creeds.[161] In such systems the nature of the life beyond the grave is variously conceived: sometimes as cheerless and gloomy (as in Finland), sometimes as pleasant (as in Samoa, New Guinea, New Caledonia, Bowditch Islands, some North American tribes, Brazil).[162]
[77]. In tracing the growth of the conception of distinctions in the other world,[163] we find first a vague opinion that those who do badly in this life are left to shift for themselves hereafter;[164] that is, there is no authority controlling the lives of men below. In the majority of cases, however, distinctions are made, but these, as is remarked above, are based on various nonmoral considerations, and have small cultural value.[165]
[78]. In the published reports of savage beliefs there is not always mention of a formal examination of the character of the dead, and probably nothing of the sort was imagined by the lowest tribes. It appears, however, in such relatively advanced peoples as the Fijians[166] and the Khonds.[167]
[79]. Moral retribution proper is found only in great civilized nations and not in all of them; the early Semites appear to have retained the old conception of punishment for ritual faults or failures, and for offenses against the national welfare. For the Hebrews the proof is found in the Old Testament passim; in the Babylonian and Assyrian literature, as far as published, there is one sign of departure from the scheme sketched in the Descent of Ishtar: Hammurabi (ca. 2000 B.C.) invokes the curses of the gods on any one who shall destroy the tablet of his penal code, and wishes that such a one may be deprived of pure water after death. In regard to the South Arabians, the pre-Mohammedan North Arabians, and the Aramæans, we have no information; and for the Phœnicians there is only the suggestion involved in the curse invoked on those who violate a tomb, and in the funeral ceremonies.[168] But the same general religious ideas prevailed throughout the ancient Semitic area, and we may probably assume that the Hebrew conception was the universal one.
[80]. In Egypt, India, China, Persia, Greece, Rome, however, and among the Jews in the Greek period,[169] higher ethical conceptions were carried over to the Underworld; judgment, it was held, was pronounced on the dead, and rewards and punishments dealt out to them according to their moral character. The Jews and the Persians went a step further, and conceived of a final general judgment, a final winding-up of human history, and a permanent reconstruction of the world on a basis largely moral, though tinged with local religious elements—a grandiose idea that has maintained itself up to the present time, embodying the conviction that the outcome of life depends on character, and that ethical retribution is the essence of the world.
[81]. This ethical constitution of the life hereafter led to the local separation of the good from the bad. Such a separation was imagined by comparatively undeveloped peoples whose ethical principle was chiefly ritualistic, as, for example, the Fijians, the American Indians, and by civilized peoples in their early stages, the Vedic Hindus[170] (Yama's abode in the sky, and a pit) and the Greeks (the Homeric Elysian Fields, and Tartarus).[171]