CHAPTER XIV.
THE SPIRIT-WORLD.
Religion of Lower Races, [342]—Souls, [343]—Burial, [347]—Future Life, [349]—Transmigration, [350]—Divine Ancestors, [351]—Demons, [352]—Nature Spirits, [357]—Gods, [358]—Worship, [364]—Moral Influence, [368].
It does not belong to the plan of this book to give a general account of the many faiths of mankind. The anthropologist, who has to look at the religions of nations as a main part of their life, may best become acquainted with their general principles by beginning with the simple notions of the lower races as to the spirit-world. That is, he has to examine how and why they believe in the soul and its existence after death, the spirits who do good and evil in the world, and the greater gods who pervade, actuate, and rule the universe. Any one who learns from savages and barbarians what their belief in spiritual beings means to them, will come into view of that stage of culture where the religion of rude tribes is at the same time their philosophy, containing such explanation of themselves and the world they live in as their uneducated minds are able to receive.
The idea of the soul which is held by uncultured races, and is the foundation of their religion, is not difficult to us to understand, if we can fancy ourselves in their place, ignorant of the very rudiments of science, and trying to get at the meaning of life by what the senses seem to tell. The great question that forces itself on their minds is one that we with all our knowledge cannot half answer, what the life is which is sometimes in us, but not always. A person who a few minutes ago was walking and talking, with all his senses active, goes off motionless and unconscious in a deep sleep, to wake after a while with renewed vigour. In other conditions the life ceases more entirely, when one is stunned or falls into a swoon or trance, where the beating of the heart and breathing seem to stop, and the body, lying deadly pale and insensible, cannot be awakened; this may last for minutes or hours, or even days, and yet after all the patient revives. Barbarians are apt to say that such a one died for a while, but his soul came back again. They have great difficulty in distinguishing real death from such trances. They will talk to a corpse, try to rouse it and even feed it, and only when it becomes noisome and must be got rid of from among the living, they are at last certain that the life has gone never to return. What, then, is this soul or life which thus goes and comes in sleep, trance, and death? To the rude philosopher, the question seems to be answered by the very evidence of his senses. When the sleeper awakens from a dream, he believes he has really somehow been away, or that other people have come to him. As it is well known by experience that men’s bodies do not go on these excursions, the natural explanation is that every man’s living self or soul is his phantom or image, which can go out of his body and see and be seen itself in dreams. Even waking men in broad daylight sometimes see these human phantoms, in what are called visions or hallucinations. They are further led to believe that the soul does not die with the body, but lives on after quitting it, for although a man may be dead and buried, his phantom-figure continues to appear to the survivors in dreams and visions. That men have such unsubstantial images belonging to them is familiar in other ways to the savage philosopher, who has watched their reflexions in still water, or their shadows following them about, fading out of sight to reappear presently somewhere else, while sometimes for a moment he has seen their living breath as a faint cloud, vanishing though one can feel that it is still there. Here then in few words is the savage and barbaric theory of souls, where life, mind, breath, shadow, reflexion, dream, vision, come together and account for one another in some such vague confused way as satisfies the untaught reasoner. The Zulu will say that at death a man’s shadow departs from his body and becomes an ancestral ghost, and the widow will relate how her husband has come in her sleep and threatened to kill her for not taking care of his children; or the son will describe how his father’s ghost stood before him in a dream, and the souls of the two, the living and the dead, went off together to visit some far-off kraal of their people. The Malays do not like to wake a sleeper, lest they should hurt him by disturbing his body while his soul is out. The Ojibwas describe how one of their chiefs died, but while they were watching the body, on the third night his shadow came back into it, and he sat up and told them how he had travelled to the River of Death, but was stopped there and sent back to his people. The Nicaraguans, when questioned by the Spaniards as to their religion, said that when a man or woman dies, there comes out of their mouth something that resembles a person and does not die, but the body remains here—it is not precisely the heart that goes above, but the breath that comes from their mouth and is called the life. The lower races sometimes avoid such confusion of thoughts as this, by treating the breath, the dream-ghost, and other appearances, as being separate souls. Thus, some Greenlanders reckoned man as having two souls, his shadow and his breath; and the Fijians said that the “dark spirit” or shadow goes down to the world below, but the “light spirit” or reflexion seen in water stays near where he dies. The reader may call to mind examples how such notions of the soul lasted on hardly changed in the classic world; how in the Iliad the dead Patroklos comes to the sleeping Achilles, who tries in vain to grasp him with loving hands, but the soul like smoke flits away below the earth; or how Hermotimos, the seer, used to go out from his body, till at last his soul, coming back from a spirit-journey, found that his wife had burnt his corpse on the funeral pile, and that he had become a bodiless ghost. At this stage the idea of the soul was taken up by the Greek philosophers and refined into more metaphysical forms; the life and mind were separated by dividing the soul into two, the animal and the rational soul, and the conception of the soul as of thin ethereal substance gave place to the definition of the immaterial soul, which is mind without matter. To follow the discussion of these transcendental problems in ancient and modern philosophy will occupy the student of metaphysics, but the best proof how the earlier and grosser soul-theory satisfied the uncultured mind is that to this day it remains substantially the belief of the majority of the human race. Even among the most civilized nations language still plainly shows its traces, as when we speak of a person being in an ecstasy or “out of himself” and “coming back to himself,” or when the souls of the dead are called shades (that is, “shadows”) or spirits or ghosts (that is, “breaths”), terms which are relics of men’s earliest theories of life.
It may have occurred to some readers that the savage philosopher ought, on precisely the same grounds, to believe his horse or dog to have a soul, a phantom-likeness of its body. This is in fact what the lower races always have thought and think still, and they follow the reasoning out in a way that surprises the modern mind, though it is quite consistent from the barbarian’s point of view. If a human soul seen in a dream is a real object, then the spear and shield it carries and the mantle over its shoulders are real objects too, and all lifeless things must have their thin flitting shadow-souls. Such are the souls of canoes and weapons and earthen pots that the Fijians fancy they see swimming down the stream pellmell into the life to come, and the ghostly funeral gifts with which the Ojibwas imagine the souls of the dead laden on their journey to the spirit-land—the men carrying their shadowy guns and pipes, the women their baskets and paddles, the little boys their toy bows and arrows. The funeral sacrifices, which in one shape or other are remembered or carried on still in every part of the globe, give us the clearest idea how barbaric religion takes in together the souls of men, animals, and things. In Peru, where a dead prince’s wives would hang themselves in order to continue in his service, and many of his attendants would be buried for him to take their souls with him, people declared that they had seen those who had long been dead walking about with their sacrificed wives, and adorned with the things that were put in the grave for them. So only a few years since in Madagascar it was said that the ghost of King Radama had been seen dressed in a uniform buried with him, and mounted on one of the horses that were killed at his tomb. With such modern instances before us, we understand the ancient funeral rites of which the traces remain in the burial-mounds on our own hills, with their skeletons of attendants lying round the chief, and the bronze weapons and golden arm-rings. Classic literature abounds in passages which show how truly the modern barbarian represents the ancient; such are the burning of Patroklos with the Trojan captives and the horses and hounds, the account of the Scythian funerals by Herodotus, and his story of Melissa’s ghost coming back shivering because the clothes had not been burnt for her at her burial. There are districts in India where the suttee or “goodwife” is even now burnt on her husband’s funeral pile. In Europe, long after the wives and slaves ceased thus to follow their master, the warrior’s horse was still solemnly killed at his grave and buried with him. This was done as lately as 1781 at Treves, when a general named Friedrich Kasimir was buried according to the rites of the Teutonic Order; and in England the pathetic ceremony of leading the horse in the soldier’s funeral is the last remnant of the ancient sacrifice. Other quaint relics of the old funeral customs are to be met with. There are German villages where the peasants put shoes on the feet of the corpse (the “hell-shoon” with which the old Northmen were provided for the dread journey to the next world), and elsewhere a needle and thread is put in for them to mend their torn clothes, while all over Europe, at an Irish wake for instance, the dead has a piece of money put in his hand to pay his way with.
Mention has just been made of ancient burial-mounds. Seeing how barbarians reverence and fear the souls of the dead, we may understand the care they take of their bodies, leaving the hut as a dwelling for the dead, or drying the corpse and setting it up on a scaffold, or burying it in a canoe or coffin, or building up a strong tomb over it, or for the ashes, if the people have taken to cremation. Prehistoric burial-places in our own country are still wonders to us for the labour they must have cost their barbaric builders. Most conspicuous are the great burial-mounds of earth or cairns of stones. Some of the largest of these appear to date from the stone-age. But their use lasted on through the bronze-age into the iron-age; and to this day in the Highlands of Scotland the memory of the old custom is so strong, that the mourners, as they may not build a cairn over the grave in the churchyard, will sometimes set up a little one where the funeral procession stops on the way. Within the old burial-mounds or barrows, there may be a cist or rude chest of stone slabs for the interment, or a chamber of rude stones, sometimes with galleries. Many such stone structures are to be seen above ground, especially the dolmens, i.e. stone tables, formed of three or four great upright stones, with a top-stone resting on them, such as Kit’s Coty House, not far from Rochester. The remains dug up show that the dolmens were tombs. Another kind of early stone monuments are the menhirs, i.e. long stones set up singly. It happens that the Khasias of north-east India have gone on to modern times setting up such rude pillars as memorials of the dead, so that it may be reasonably guessed that those in Brittany for instance had the same purpose. Another kind of rude stone structures well known in Europe are the cromlechs, or stone circles, formed of upright stones in a ring, such as Stanton Drew, not far from Bristol. There is proof that the stone circles have often to do with burials, for they may surround a burial-mound, or have a dolmen in the middle. But considering how tombs are apt to become temples where the ghost of the buried chief or prophet is worshipped, it is likely that such stone circles should also serve as temples, as in the case of South India at the present time, where cocks are actually sacrificed to the village deity, who is represented by the large stone in the centre of a cromlech. Rude stone monuments may be traced in a remarkable line on the map, from India across to North Africa, and up the west side of Europe (see Fergusson’s map.) The purpose of them all is not fully understood, especially the lines of great stones at Carnac and Abury, and Stonehenge with its great hewn upright and cross stones. But, as has been here shown, there are facts which go far to explain the meaning of dolmens, menhirs, and cromlechs. The fanciful speculations of the old-fashioned antiquaries, such as that the dolmens were “Druid’s altars,” are giving place to sober examination such as the reader may find in Lubbock’s Prehistoric Times.
In the barbaric religion, which has left such clear traces in our midst, what is supposed to become of the soul after death? The answers are many, but they agree in this, that the ghosts must be somewhere whence they can come to visit the living, especially at night time. Some tribes say that the soul continues to haunt the hut where it died, which is accordingly deserted for it; or it hovers near the burial-ground, which is sometimes the place of village resort, so that the souls of ancestors can look on kindly, like the old people sitting round the village green watching the youngsters at their sports; or the ghosts flit away to some region of the dead in the deep forests or on mountain-tops or far-away islands over the sea, or up on the plains above the sky, or down in the depths below the ground where the sun descends at night. Such people as the Zulus can show the holes where one can descend by a cavern into the under-world of the dead, an idea well known in the classic lake Avernus, and which has lasted on to our own day in St. Patrick’s Purgatory in Lough Dearg. By a train of fancy easy to follow, it is often held that the home of the dead has to do with that far-west region where the sun dies at night. Islanders like the Maoris imagine the souls speeding away from the westernmost cape of New Zealand, just as on the coast of Brittany, where Cape Raz stands out westward into the ocean, there is the “bay of souls,” the launching-place where the departed spirits sail off across the sea. Many rude tribes think the spirit-world to be the pleasant land they see in dreams, where the dead live in their spirit-villages, and there is game and fish in plenty, and the sun always shines; but others fancy it the dim land of shadows, the cavernous under-world of night. Both ideas are familiar to us in poetry—one in the earthly paradise of the legends, the other in such passages as describe Odysseus’ visit to the bloodless ghosts in the dreary dusk of Hades, or the shadows of the dead in Purgatory wondering to see Dante there, whose fleshly body, unlike their own phantom forms, stops the sunlight and casts a shadow.
Hitherto we have been speaking of the bodiless souls or ghosts of the dead, but it also agrees with their nature that they may enter into new bodies and live again on earth. In fact one of the most usual beliefs of the lower races is that the souls of dead ancestors are re-born in children, an idea which explains the fact of children having a likeness to the father’s or mother’s family. For instance, the Yoruba negroes greet a new-born child with the salute, “Thou art come!” and then set themselves to decide what ancestral soul has returned. It does not, however, follow that the body in which the soul takes up its new abode should be human: it may enter into a bear or jackal, or fly away in a bird, or, as the Zulus think, it may pass into one of those harmless snakes which creep about in the huts, liking the warmth of the family hearth, as they did while they were old people, and still kindly taking the food given by their grandchildren. In such simple forms there appears among the lower races the notion of transmigration which in Brahmanism and Buddhism becomes a great religious doctrine.