BARBARIC AND CIVILISED NOTIONS OF THE SOUL’S NATURE.
In proof of the closing remarks in § VII., that the breath has given the chief name to the soul, we find the Western Australians using the same word, waug, for “breath, spirit, soul”; in Java the word nawa is used for “health, life, soul”; in the Dakota tongue niya is literally “breath,” figuratively “life”; in Netela piuts is “breath” and “soul”; in Eskimo silla means “air” and “wind,” and is also the word that conveys the highest idea of the world as a whole, and of the reasoning faculty. The supreme existence they call Sillam Innua, Owner of the Air, or of the All; in the Yakama tongue of Oregon wkrisha signifies “there is wind,” wkrishwit, “life”; with the Aztecs ehecatl expressed “air, life, and the soul,” and, personified in their myths, it was said to have been born of the breath of Tezcatlipoca, their highest divinity, who himself is often called Yoalliehecatl, the Wind of Night.[77] This identity of wind with breath, of breath with spirit, and thence of spirit with the Great Spirit, which
“Sees God in clouds, and hears Him in the wind,”
has further illustration in the legends of the Quiches, in which the unknown creative power is Hurakan, a name familiar to us under the form hurricane, and in our own sacred records, where the advent of the Holy Spirit is described “as of a rushing mighty wind.” In the Mohawk language atonritz, the “soul,” is from atonrion, “to breathe”; whilst, as showing the analogy between the effects of restricted sense and restricted civilisation, Dr. Tylor quotes the case of a girl who was a deaf-mute as well as blind, and who, when telling a dream in gesture language, said: “I thought God took away my breath to heaven.” Among the higher languages the same evidence abides.
“The spirit doth but mean the breath.”
That word spirit is derived from a verb spirare, which means “to draw breath.” Animus, “the mind,” is cognate with anima, “air”; in Irish, which belongs to the same family of speech as Latin, namely, the Aryan or Indo-European, we have anal, “breath,” and anam, “life,” or “soul”; and in Sanskrit we find the root an, to “blow” or “breathe,” whence anila, “wind,” and in Greek anemos, with the like meaning. In Hampole’s Ayenbite of Inwyt, i.e. “Prick or Remorse of Conscience,” a poem of the fourteenth century, we find ande or “breath” used as “soul.”
“Thus sall ilka saul other se (i.e. in the other world)
For nan of tham may feled be
Na mar than here a man, ande may
When it passes fra his mouthe away.”[78]
The Greek psyche, pneuma, and thymos, each meaning “soul” and “spirit,” are from roots expressing the wind or breath. In Slavonic the root du has developed the meaning of breath into that of soul or spirit, and the dialect of the gipsies has duk with the meanings of breath, spirit, ghost. That word ghost, the German geist, the Dutch geest, from a root meaning “to blow with violence,” is connected with gust, gas, geyser; in Scandinavian, glösor, “to pour forth.” In non-Aryan languages, as the Finnish, far means “soul, breath, spirit, wind”; henki, “spirit, person, breath, air”; the Hebrew nephesh, “breath,” has also the meanings of “life, soul, mind”; and ruach and neshamah, to which the Arabic nefs and ruh correspond, pass from meaning “breath” to “spirit.” The legend of man’s creation records that he became a living soul through God breathing into his nostrils “the breath of life,” and concerning this the Psalmist says of all that live, “Thou takest away their breath, they die, and return unto the dust.” As a final illustration, the Egyptian kneph has the alternative meanings of “life” and “breath.”[79]
When we pass from names to descriptions, we find the same underlying idea of the ethereal nature of spirit. The natives of Nicaragua, California, and other countries remote from these, agree in describing the other self as air or breeze, which passes in and out through the mouth and nostrils. The Tongans conceived it as the aëriform part of the body, related to it as the perfume to the flower. The Greenlanders describe it as pale and soft, as without flesh and bone, so that he who tries to seize it grasps nothing. The Lapps say that the ghosts are invisible to all but the Shamans. The Congo negroes leave the house of the dead unswept for a year, lest the dust should injure the delicate substance of the ghost; and the German peasants have a saying that a door should not be slammed, lest a soul gets pinched in it. In some parts of Northern Europe, when the wind-god, Odin, rides the sky with his furious spectral host, the peasants open the windows of every sick-room that the soul of the dying may have free exit to join the wild chase; whilst both here and in France it is still no uncommon practice to open doors and windows that the soul may depart quickly. Dr. Tylor[80] cites a passage from Hampole, in which the author speaks of the intenser suffering which the soul undergoes in purgatory by reason of its delicate organisation.
“The soul is more tendre and nesche (soft)
Than the bodi that hath bones and fleysche;
Thanne the soul that is so tendere of kinde,
Mote nedis hure penaunce hardere-y-finde,
Than eni bodi that evere on live was,”