And I shall know him when we meet.’
This world-wide thought, coming into view here in a multitude of cases from all grades of culture, needs no collection of ordinary instances to illustrate it.[[694]] But a quaint and special group of beliefs will serve to display the thoroughness with which the soul is thus conceived as an image of the body. As a consistent corollary to such an opinion, it is argued that the mutilation of the body will have a corresponding effect upon the soul, and very low savage races have philosophy enough to work out this idea. Thus it was recorded of the Indians of Brazil by one of the early European visitors, that they ‘believe that the dead arrive in the other world wounded or hacked to pieces, in fact just as they left this.’[[695]] Thus, too, the Australian who has slain his enemy will cut off the right thumb of the corpse, so that although the spirit will become a hostile ghost, it cannot throw with its mutilated hand the shadowy spear, and may be safely left to wander, malignant but harmless.[[696]] The negro fears long sickness before death, such as will send him lean and feeble into the next world. His theory of the mutilation of soul with body could not be brought more vividly into view than in that ugly story of the West Indian planter, whose slaves began to seek in suicide at once relief from present misery and restoration to their native land; but the white man was too cunning for them, he cut off the heads and hands of the corpses, and the survivors saw that not even death could save them from a master who could maim their very souls in the next world.[[697]] The same rude and primitive belief continues among nations risen far higher in intellectual rank. The Chinese hold in especial horror the punishment of decapitation, considering that he who quits this world lacking a member will so arrive in the next, and a case is recorded lately of a criminal at Amoy who for this reason begged to die instead by the cruel death of crucifixion, and was crucified accordingly.[[698]] The series ends as usual in the folklore of the civilized world. The phantom skeleton in chains that haunted the house at Bologna, showed the way to the garden where was buried the real chained fleshless skeleton it belonged to, and came no more when the remains had been duly buried. When the Earl of Cornwall met the fetch of his friend William Rufus carried black and naked on a black goat across the Bodmin moors, he saw that it was wounded through the midst of the breast; and afterwards he heard that at that very hour the king had been slain in the New Forest by the arrow of Walter Tirell.[[699]]
In studying the nature of the soul as conceived among the lower races, and in tracing such conceptions onward among the higher, circumstantial details are available. It is as widely recognized among mankind that souls or ghosts have voices, as that they have visible forms, and indeed the evidence for both is of the same nature. Men who perceive evidently that souls do talk when they present themselves in dream or vision, naturally take for granted at once the objective reality of the ghostly voice, and of the ghostly form from which it proceeds. This is involved in the series of narratives of spiritual communications with living men, from savagery onward to civilization, while the more modern doctrine of the subjectivity of such phenomena recognizes the phenomena themselves, but offers a different explanation of them. One special conception, however, requires particular notice. This defines the spirit-voice as being a low murmur, chirp, or whistle, as it were the ghost of a voice. The Algonquin Indians of North America could hear the shadow-souls of the dead chirp like crickets.[[700]] The divine spirits of the New Zealand dead, coming to converse with the living, utter their words in whistling tones, and such utterances by a squeaking noise are mentioned elsewhere in Polynesia.[[701]] The Zulu diviner’s familiar spirits are ancestral manes, who talk in a low whistling tone short of a full whistle, whence they have their name of ‘imilozi’ or whistlers.[[702]] These ideas correspond with classic descriptions of the ghostly voice, as a ‘twitter or ‘thin murmur:’
Ψυχὴ δὲ κατὰ χθονὸς ἠύτε καπνὸς,
Ψχετο τετριγυία.’[[703]]
‘Umbra cruenta Remi visa est assistere lecto,
Atque haec exiguo murmure verba loqui.’[[704]]
As the attributes of the soul or ghost extend to other spiritual beings, and the utterances of such are to a great extent given by the voice of mediums, we connect these accounts with the notion that the language of demons is also a low whistle or mutter, whence the well-known practice of whispering or murmuring charms, the ‘susurrus necromanticus’ of sorcerers, to whom the already cited description of ‘wizards that peep (i.e. chirp) and mutter’ is widely applicable.[[705]]
The conception of dreams and visions as caused by present objective figures, and the identification of such phantom souls with the shadow and the breath, has led to the treatment of souls as substantial material beings. Thus it is a usual proceeding to make openings through solid materials to allow souls to pass. The Iroquois in old times used to leave an opening in the grave for the lingering soul to visit its body, and some of them still bore holes in the coffin for the same purpose.[[706]] The Malagasy sorcerer, for the cure of a sick man who had lost his soul, would make a hole in a burial-house to let out a spirit which he would catch in his cap and so convey to the patient’s head.[[707]] The Chinese make a hole in the roof to let out the soul at death.[[708]] And lastly, the custom of opening a window or door for the departing soul when it quits the body is to this day a very familiar superstition in France, Germany, and England.[[709]] Again, the souls of the dead are thought susceptible of being beaten, hurt and driven like any other living creatures. Thus the Queensland aborigines would beat the air in an annual mock fight, held to scare away the souls that death had let loose among the living since last year.[[710]] Thus North American Indians, when they had tortured an enemy to death, ran about crying and beating with sticks to scare the ghost away; they have been known to set nets round their cabins to catch and keep out neighbours’ departed souls; fancying the soul of a dying man to go out at the wigwam roof, they would habitually beat the sides with sticks to drive it forth; we even hear of the widow going off from her husband’s funeral followed by a person flourishing a handful of twigs about her head like a flyflapper, to drive off her husband’s ghost and leave her free to marry again.[[711]] With a kindlier feeling, the Congo negroes abstained for a whole year after a death from sweeping the house, lest the dust should injure the delicate substance of the ghost;[[712]] the Tonquinese avoided house-cleaning during the festival when the souls of the dead came back to their houses for the New Year’s visit;[[713]] and it seems likely that the special profession of the Roman ‘everriatores’ who swept the houses out after a funeral, was connected with a similar idea.[[714]] To this day, it remains a German peasants’ saying that it is wrong to slam a door, lest one should pinch a soul in it.[[715]] The not uncommon practice of strewing ashes to show the footprints of ghosts or demons takes for granted that they are substantial bodies. In the literature of animism, extreme tests of the weight of ghosts are now and then forthcoming. They range from the declaration of a Basuto diviner that the late queen had been bestriding his shoulders, and he never felt such a weight in his life, to Glanvil’s story of David Hunter the neat-herd, who lifted up the old woman’s ghost, and she felt just like a bag of feathers in his arms, or the pathetic German superstition that the dead mother’s coming back in the night to suckle the baby she has left on earth, may be known by the hollow pressed down in the bed where she lay, and at last down to the alleged modern spiritualistic reckoning of the weight of a human soul at from 3 to 4 ounces.[[716]]
Explicit statements as to the substance of soul are to be found both among low and high races, in an instructive series of definitions. The Tongans imagined the human soul to be the finer or more aeriform part of the body, which leaves it suddenly at the moment of death; something comparable to the perfume and essence of a flower as related to the more solid vegetable fibre.[[717]] The Greenland seers described the soul as they habitually perceived it in their visions; it is pale and soft, they said, and he who tries to seize it feels nothing, for it has no flesh nor bone nor sinew.[[718]] The Caribs did not think the soul so immaterial as to be invisible, but said it was subtle and thin like a purified body.[[719]] Turning to higher races, we may take the Siamese as an example of a people who conceive of souls as consisting of subtle matter escaping sight and touch, or as united to a swiftly moving aerial body.[[720]] In the classic world, it is recorded as an opinion of Epicurus that ‘they who say the soul is incorporeal talk folly, for it could neither do nor suffer anything were it such.’[[721]] Among the Fathers, Irenæus describes souls as incorporeal in comparison with mortal bodies,[[722]] and Tertullian relates a vision or revelation of a certain Montanist prophetess, of the soul seen by her corporeally, thin and lucid, aerial in colour and human in form.[[723]] For an example of mediæval doctrine, may be cited a 14th-century English poem, the ‘Ayenbite of Inwyt’ (i.e. ‘Remorse of Conscience’) which points out how the soul, by reason of the thinness of its substance, suffers all the more in purgatory: