Of such funeral rites, carried out to the death, graphic and horrid descriptions are recorded in the countries across Africa—East, Central, and West. A headman of the Wadoe is buried sitting in a shallow pit, and with the corpse a male and female slave alive, he with a bill-hook in his hand to cut fuel for his lord in the death-world, she seated on a little stool with the dead chief’s head in her lap. A chief of Unyamwezi is entombed in a vaulted pit, sitting on a low stool with a bow in his right hand, and provided with a pot of native beer; with him are shut in alive three women slaves, and the ceremony is concluded with a libation of beer on the earth heaped up above them all. The same idea which in Guinea makes it common for the living to send messages by the dying to the dead, is developed in Ashanti and Dahome into a monstrous system of massacre. The King of Dahome must enter Deadland with a ghostly court of hundreds of wives, eunuchs, singers, drummers, and soldiers. Nor is this all. Captain Burton thus describes the yearly ‘Customs:’—‘They periodically supply the departed monarch with fresh attendants in the shadowy world. For unhappily these murderous scenes are an expression, lamentably mistaken but perfectly sincere, of the liveliest filial piety.’ Even this annual slaughter must be supplemented by almost daily murder:—‘Whatever action, however trivial, is performed by the King, it must dutifully be reported to his sire in the shadowy realm. A victim, almost always a war-captive, is chosen; the message is delivered to him, an intoxicating draught of rum follows it, and he is dispatched to Hades in the best of humours.’[[737]] In southern districts of Africa, accounts of the same class begin in Congo and Angola with the recorded slaying of the dead man’s favourite wives, to live with him in the other world, a practice still in vogue among the Chevas of the Zambesi district, and formerly known among the Maravis; while the funeral sacrifice of attendants with a chief is a thing of the past among the Barotse, as among the Zulus, who yet have not forgotten the days when the chief’s servants and attendant warriors were cast into the fire which had consumed his body, that they might go with him, and prepare things beforehand, and get food for him.[[738]]
If now we turn to the records of Asia and Europe, we shall find the sacrifice of attendants for the dead widely prevalent in both continents in old times, while in the east its course may be traced continuing onward to our own day. The two Mohammedans who travelled in Southern Asia in the ninth century relate that on the accession of certain kings a quantity of rice is prepared, which is eaten by some three or four hundred men, who present themselves voluntarily to share it, thereby undertaking to burn themselves at the monarch’s death. With this corresponds Marco Polo’s thirteenth-century account in Southern India of the king of Maabar’s guard of horsemen, who, when he dies and his body is burnt, throw themselves into the fire to do him service in the next world.[[739]] In the seventeenth century the practice is described as still prevailing in Japan, where, on the death of a nobleman, from ten to thirty of his servants put themselves to death by the ‘hara kari,’ or ripping-up, having indeed engaged during his lifetime, by the solemn compact of drinking wine together, to give their bodies to their lord at his death. Yet already in ancient times such funeral sacrifices were passing into survival, when the servants who followed their master in death were replaced by clay images set up at the tomb.[[740]] Among the Ossetes of the Caucasus, an interesting relic of widow-sacrifice is still kept up: the dead man’s widow and his saddle-horse are led thrice round the grave, and no man may marry the widow or mount the horse thus devoted.[[741]] In China, legend preserves the memory of the ancient funeral human sacrifice. The brother of Chin Yang, a disciple of Confucius, died, and his widow and steward wished to bury some living persons with him, to serve him in the regions below. Thereupon the sage suggested that the proper victims would be the widow and steward themselves, but this not precisely meeting their views, the matter dropped, and the deceased was interred without attendants. This story at least shows the rite to have been not only known but understood in China long ago. In modern China, the suicide of widows to accompany their husbands is a recognized practice, sometimes even performed in public. Moreover, the ceremonies of providing sedan-bearers and an umbrella-bearer for the dead, and sending mounted horsemen to announce beforehand his arrival to the authorities of Hades, although these bearers and messengers are only made of paper and burnt, seem to represent survivals of a more murderous reality.[[742]]
The Aryan race gives striking examples of the rite of funeral human sacrifice in its sternest shape, whether in history or in myth, that records as truly as history the manners of old days.[[743]] The episodes of the Trojan captives laid with the horses and hounds on the funeral pile of Patroklos, and of Evadne throwing herself into the funeral pile of her husband, and Pausanias’s narrative of the suicide of the three Messenian widows, are among its Greek representatives.[[744]] In Scandinavian myth, Baldr is burnt with his dwarf foot-page, his horse and saddle; Brynhild lies on the pile by her beloved Sigurd, and men and maids follow after them on the hell-way.[[745]] The Gauls in Cæsar’s time burned at the dead man’s sumptuous funeral whatever was dear to him, animals also, and much-loved slaves and clients.[[746]] Old mentions of Slavonic heathendom describe the burning of the dead with clothing and weapons, horses and hounds, with faithful servants, and above all, with wives. Thus St. Boniface says that ‘the Wends keep matrimonial love with so great zeal, that the wife may refuse to survive her husband, and she is held praiseworthy among women who slays herself by her own hand, that she may be burnt on one pyre with her lord.’[[747]] This Aryan rite of widow-sacrifice has not only an ethnographic and antiquarian interest, but even a place in modern politics. In Brahmanic India the widow of a Hindu of the Brahman or the Kshatriya caste was burnt on the funeral pile with her husband, as a satî or ‘good woman,’ which word has passed into English as suttee. Mentioned in classic and mediæval times, the practice was in full vigour at the beginning of the last century.[[748]] Often one dead husband took many wives with him. Some went willingly and gaily to the new life, many were driven by force of custom, by fear of disgrace, by family persuasion, by priestly threats and promises, by sheer violence. When the rite was suppressed under modern British rule, the priesthood resisted to the uttermost, appealing to the Veda, as sanctioning the ordinance, and demanding that the foreign rulers should respect it. Yet in fact, as Prof. H. H. Wilson proved, the priests had actually falsified their sacred Veda in support of a rite enjoined by long and inveterate prejudice, but not by the traditional standards of Hindu faith. The ancient Brahmanic funeral rites have been minutely detailed from the Sanskrit authorities in an essay by Prof. Max Müller. Their directions are that the widow is to be set on the funeral pile with her husband’s corpse, and if he be a warrior his bow is to be placed there too. But then a brother-in-law or adopted child or old servant is to lead the widow down again at the summons, ‘Rise, woman, come to the world of life; thou sleepest nigh unto him whose life is gone. Come to us. Thou hast thus fulfilled thy duties of a wife to the husband who once took thy hand, and made thee a mother.’ The bow, however, is to be broken and thrown back upon the pile, and the dead man’s sacrificial instruments are to be laid with him and really consumed. While admitting that the modern ordinance of Suttee-burning is a corrupt departure from the early Brahmanic ritual, we may nevertheless find reason to consider the practice as not a new invention by the later Hindu priesthood, but as the revival, under congenial influences, of an ancient Aryan rite belonging originally to a period even earlier than the Veda. The ancient authorized ceremony looks as though, in a primitive form of the rite, the widow had been actually sent with the dead, for which real sacrifice a humaner law substituted a mere pretence. This view is supported by the existence of an old and express prohibition of the wife being sacrificed, a prohibition seemingly directed against a real custom, ‘to follow the dead husband is prohibited, so says the law of the Brahmans. With regard to the other castes this law for women may be or may not be.’[[749]] To treat the Hindu widow-burning as a case of survival and revival seems to me most in accordance with a general ethnographic view of the subject. Widow-sacrifice is found in various regions of the world under a low state of civilization, and this fits with the hypothesis of its having belonged to the Aryan race while yet in an early and barbarous condition. Thus the prevalence of a rite of suttee like that of modern India among ancient Aryan nations settled in Europe, Greeks, Scandinavians, Germans, Slaves, may be simply accounted for by direct inheritance from the remote common antiquity of them all. If this theory be sound, it will follow that ancient as the Vedic ordinances may be, they represent in this matter a reform and a reaction against a yet more ancient barbaric rite of widow-sacrifice, which they prohibited in fact, but yet kept up in symbol. The history of religion displays but too plainly the proneness of mankind to relapse, in spite of reformation, into the lower and darker condition of the past. Stronger and more tenacious than even Vedic authority, the hideous custom of the suttee may have outlived an attempt to suppress it in early Brahmanic times, and the English rulers, in abolishing it, may have abolished a relic not merely of degenerate Hinduism, but of the far more remotely ancient savagery out of which the Aryan civilization had grown.
In now passing from the consideration of the souls of men to that of the souls of the lower animals, we have first to inform ourselves as to the savage man’s idea, which is very different from the civilized man’s, of the nature of these lower animals. A remarkable group of observances customary among rude tribes will bring this distinction sharply into view. Savages talk quite seriously to beasts alive or dead as they would to men alive or dead, offer them homage, ask pardon when it is their painful duty to hunt and kill them. A North American Indian will reason with a horse as if rational. Some will spare the rattlesnake, fearing the vengeance of its spirit if slain; others will salute the creature reverently, bid it welcome as a friend from the land of spirits, sprinkle a pinch of tobacco on its head for an offering, catch it by the tail and dispatch it with extreme dexterity, and carry off its skin as a trophy. If an Indian is attacked and torn by a bear, it is that the beast fell upon him intentionally in anger, perhaps to revenge the hurt done to another bear. When a bear is killed, they will beg pardon of him, or even make him condone the offence by smoking the peace-pipe with his murderers, who put the pipe in his mouth and blow down it, begging his spirit not to take revenge.[[750]] So in Africa, the Kafirs will hunt the elephant, begging him not to tread on them and kill them, and when he is dead they will assure him that they did not kill him on purpose, and they will bury his trunk, for the elephant is a mighty chief, and his trunk is his hand that he may hurt withal. The Congo people will even avenge such a murder by a pretended attack on the hunters who did the deed.[[751]] Such customs are common among the lower Asiatic tribes. The Stiens of Kambodia ask pardon of the beast they have killed;[[752]] the Ainos of Yesso kill the bear, offer obeisance and salutation to him, and cut up his carcase.[[753]] The Koriaks, if they have slain a bear or wolf, will flay him, dress one of their people in the skin, and dance round him, chanting excuses that they did not do it, and especially laying the blame on a Russian. But if it is a fox, they take his skin, wrap his dead body in hay, and sneering tell him to go to his own people and say what famous hospitality he has had, and how they gave him a new coat instead of his old one.[[754]] The Samoyeds excuse themselves to the slain bear, telling him it was the Russians who did it, and that a Russian knife will cut him up.[[755]] The Goldi will set up the slain bear, call him ‘my lord’ and do ironical homage to him, or taking him alive will fatten him in a cage, call him ‘son’ and ‘brother,’ and kill and eat him as a sacrifice at a solemn festival.[[756]] In Borneo, the Dayaks, when they have caught an alligator with a baited hook and rope, address him with respect and soothing till they have his legs fast, and then mocking call him ‘rajah’ and ‘grandfather.’[[757]] Thus when the savage gets over his fears, he still keeps up in ironical merriment the reverence which had its origin in trembling sincerity. Even now the Norse hunter will say with horror of a bear that will attack man, that he can be ‘no Christian bear.’
The sense of an absolute psychical distinction between man and beast, so prevalent in the civilized world, is hardly to be found among the lower races. Men to whom the cries of beasts and birds seem like human language, and their actions guided as it were by human thought, logically enough allow the existence of souls to beasts, birds, and reptiles, as to men. The lower psychology cannot but recognize in beasts the very characteristics which it attributes to the human soul, namely, the phenomena of life and death, will and judgment, and the phantom seen in vision or in dream. As for believers, savage or civilized, in the great doctrine of metempsychosis, these not only consider that an animal may have a soul, but that this soul may have inhabited a human being, and thus the creature may be in fact their own ancestor or once familiar friend. A line of facts, arranged as waymarks along the course of civilization, will serve to indicate the history of opinion from savagery onward, as to the souls of animals during life and after death. North American Indians held every animal to have its spirit, and these spirits their future life; the soul of the Canadian dog went to serve his master in the other world; among the Sioux, the prerogative of having four souls was not confined to man, but belonged also to the bear, the most human of animals.[[758]] The Greenlanders considered that a sick human soul might be replaced by the sorcerer with a fresh healthy soul of a hare, a reindeer, or a young child.[[759]] Maori tale-tellers have heard of the road by which the spirits of dogs descend to Reinga, the Hades of the departed; the Hovas of Madagascar know that the ghosts of beasts and men, dwelling in a great mountain in the south called Ambondrombe, come out occasionally to walk among the tombs or execution-places of criminals.[[760]] The Kamchadals held that every creature, even the smallest fly, would live again in the under-world.[[761]] The Kukis of Assam think that the ghost of every animal a Kuki kills in the chase or for the feast will belong to him in the next life, even as the enemy he slays in the field will then become his slave. The Karens apply the doctrine of the spirit or personal life-phantom, which is apt to wander from the body and thus suffer injury, equally to men and to animals.[[762]] The Zulus say the cattle they kill come to life again, and become the property of the dwellers in the world beneath.[[763]] The Siamese butcher, when in defiance of the very principles of his Buddhism he slaughters an ox, before he kills the creature has at least the grace to beseech its spirit to seek a happier abode.[[764]] In connexion with such transmigration, Pythagorean and Platonic philosophy gives to the lower animals undying souls, while other classic opinion may recognize in beasts only an inferior order of soul, only the ‘anima’ but not the human ‘animus’ besides. Thus Juvenal:
‘Principio indulsit communis conditor illis
Tantum animas; nobis animum quoque....’[[765]]
Through the middle ages, controversy as to the psychology of brutes has lasted on into our own times, ranging between two extremes; on the one the theory of Descartes which reduced animals to mere machines, on the other what Mr. Alger defines as ‘the faith that animals have immaterial and deathless souls.’ Among modern speculations may be instanced that of Wesley, who thought that in the next life animals will be raised even above their bodily and mental state at the creation, ‘the horridness of their appearance will be exchanged for their primæval beauty,’ and it even may be that they will be made what men are now, creatures capable of religion. Adam Clarke’s argument for the future life of animals rests on abstract justice: whereas they did not sin, but yet are involved in the sufferings of sinful man, and cannot have in the present state the happiness designed for them, it is reasonable that they must have it in another.[[766]] Although, however, the primitive belief in the souls of animals still survives to some extent in serious philosophy, it is obvious that the tendency of educated opinion on the question whether brutes have soul, as distinguished from life and mind, has for ages been in a negative and sceptical direction. The doctrine has fallen from its once high estate. It belonged originally to real, though rude science. It has now sunk to become a favourite topic in that mild speculative talk which still does duty so largely as intellectual conversation, and even then its propounders defend it with a lurking consciousness of its being after all a piece of sentimental nonsense.
Animals being thus considered in the primitive psychology to have souls like human beings, it follows as the simplest matter of course that tribes who kill wives and slaves, to dispatch their souls on errands of duty with their departed lords, may also kill animals in order that their spirits may do such service as is proper to them. The Pawnee warrior’s horse is slain on his grave to be ready for him to mount again, and the Comanche’s best horses are buried with his favourite weapons and his pipe, all alike to be used in the distant happy hunting-grounds.[[767]] In South America not only do such rites occur, but they reach a practically disastrous extreme. Patagonian tribes, says D’Orbigny, believe in another life, where they are to enjoy perfect happiness, therefore they bury with the deceased his arms and ornaments, and even kill on his tomb all the animals which belonged to him, that he may find them in the abode of bliss; and this opposes an insurmountable barrier to all civilization, by preventing them from accumulating property and fixing their habitations.[[768]] Not only do Pope’s now hackneyed lines express a real motive with which the Indian’s dog is buried with him, but on the North American continent the spirit of the dog has another remarkable office to perform. Certain Esquimaux, as Cranz relates, would lay a dog’s head in a child’s grave, that the soul of the dog, who is everywhere at home, might guide the helpless infant to the land of souls. In accordance with this, Captain Scoresby in Jameson’s Land found a dog’s skull in a small grave, probably a child’s. Again, in the distant region of the Aztecs, one of the principal funeral ceremonies was to slaughter a techichi, or native dog; it was burnt or buried with the corpse, with a cotton thread fastened to its neck, and its office was to convey the deceased across the deep waters of Chiuhnahuapan, on the way to the Land of the Dead.[[769]] The dead Buraet’s favourite horse, led saddled to the grave, killed, and flung in, may serve for a Tatar example.[[770]] In Tonquin, even wild animals have been customarily drowned at funeral ceremonies of princes, to be at the service of the departed in the next world.[[771]] Among Semitic tribes, an instance of the custom may be found in the Arab sacrifice of a camel on the grave, for the dead man’s spirit to ride upon.[[772]] Among the nations of the Aryan race in Europe, the prevalence of such rites is deep, wide, and full of purpose. Thus, warriors were provided in death with horses and housings, with hounds and falcons. Customs thus described in chronicle and legend, are vouched for in our own time by the opening of old barbaric burial-places. How clear a relic of savage meaning lies here may be judged from a Livonian account as late as the fourteenth century, which relates how men and women slaves, sheep and oxen, with other things, were burnt with the dead, who, it was believed, would reach some region of the living, and find there, with the multitude of cattle and slaves, a country of life and happiness.[[773]] As usual, these rites may be traced onward in survival. The Mongols, who formerly slaughtered camels and horses at their owner’s burial, have been induced to replace the actual sacrifice by a gift of the cattle to the Lamas.[[774]] The Hindus offer a black cow to the Brahmans, in order to secure their passage across the Vaitaranî, the river of death, and will often die grasping the cow’s tail as if to swim across in herdsman’s fashion, holding on to a cow.[[775]] It is mentioned as a belief in Northern Europe that he who has given a cow to the poor will find a cow to take him over the bridge of the dead, and a custom of leading a cow in the funeral procession is said to have been kept up to modern times.[[776]] All these rites probably belong together as connected with ancient funeral sacrifice, and the survival of the custom of sacrificing the warrior’s horse at his tomb is yet more striking. Saint-Foix long ago put the French evidence very forcibly. Mentioning the horse led at the funeral of Charles VI., with the four valets-de-pied in black, and bareheaded, holding the corners of its caparison, he recalls the horses and servants killed and buried with præ-Christian kings. And that his readers may not think this an extraordinary idea, he brings forward the records of property and horses being presented at the offertory in Paris, in 1329, of Edward III. presenting horses at King John’s funeral in London, and of the funeral service for Bertrand Duguesclin, at St. Denis, in 1389, when horses were offered, the Bishop of Auxerre laid his hand on their heads, and they were afterwards compounded for.[[777]] Germany retained the actual sacrifice within the memory of living men. A cavalry general, Count Friedrich Kasimir Boos von Waldeck, was buried at Treves in 1781 according to the forms of the Teutonic Order; his horse was led in the procession, and the coffin having been lowered into the grave the horse was killed and thrown in upon it.[[778]] This was, perhaps, the last occasion when such a sacrifice was consummated in solemn form in Europe. But that pathetic incident of a soldier’s funeral, the leading of the saddled and bridled charger in the mournful procession, keeps up to this day a lingering reminiscence of the grim religious rite now passed away.
Plants, partaking with animals the phenomena of life and death, health and sickness, not unnaturally have some kind of soul ascribed to them. In fact, the notion of a vegetable soul, common to plants and to the higher organisms possessing an animal soul in addition, was familiar to mediæval philosophy, and is not yet forgotten by naturalists. But in the lower ranges of culture, at least within one wide district of the world, the souls of plants are much more fully identified with the souls of animals. The Society Islanders seem to have attributed ‘varua,’ i.e. surviving soul or spirit, not to men only but to animals and plants.[[779]] The Dayaks of Borneo not only consider men and animals to have a spirit or living principle, whose departure from the body causes sickness and eventually death, but they also give to the rice its ‘samangat padi,’ or ‘spirit of the paddy,’ and they hold feasts to retain this soul securely, lest the crop should decay.[[780]] The Karens say that plants as well as men and animals have their ‘là’ (‘kelah’), and the spirit of sickly rice is here also called back like a human spirit considered to have left the body. Their formulas for the purpose have even been written down, and this is part of one:—‘O come, rice kelah, come. Come to the field. Come to the rice.... Come from the West. Come from the East. From the throat of the bird, from the maw of the ape, from the throat of the elephant.... From all granaries come. O rice kelah, come to the rice.’[[781]] There is reason to think that the doctrine of the spirits of plants lay deep in the intellectual history of South-East Asia, but was in great measure superseded under Buddhist influence. The Buddhist books show that in the early days of their religion, it was matter of controversy whether trees had souls, and therefore whether they might lawfully be injured. Orthodox Buddhism decided against the tree-souls, and consequently against the scruple to harm them, declaring trees to have no mind or sentient principle, though admitting that certain dewas or spirits do reside in the body of trees, and speak from within them. Buddhists also relate that a heterodox sect kept up the early doctrine of the actual animate life of trees, in connexion with which may be remembered Marco Polo’s somewhat doubtful statement as to certain austere Indians objecting to green herbs for such a reason, and some other passages from later writers. The subject of the spirits of plants is an obscure one, whether from the lower races not having definite opinions, or from our not finding it easy to trace them.[[782]] The evidence from funeral sacrifices, so valuable as to most departments of early psychology, fails us here, from plants not being thought suitable to send for the service of the dead.[[783]] Yet, as we shall see more fully elsewhere, there are two topics which bear closely on the matter. On the one hand, the doctrine of transmigration widely and clearly recognises the idea of trees or smaller plants being animated by human souls; on the other, the belief in tree-spirits and the practice of tree-worship involve notions more or less closely coinciding with that of tree-souls, as when the classic hamadryad dies with her tree, or when the Talein of South-East Asia, considering every tree to have a demon or spirit, offers prayers before he cuts one down.