a doctrine clearly due to Patristic theories of incorporeal souls. And a modern poet, Dante Rossetti, in his Blessed Damozel, when he describes her as leaning out from the gold bar of heaven and looking down towards the earth, that “spins like a fretful midge,” whence she awaits the coming of her lover, depicts the souls mounting up to God as passing by her “like thin flames.” The Greeks and, following them, the Romans, conceived the soul as of thin, impalpable texture, as exhaled with the dying breath, or, as in Homer, rushing out through the wound that causes the warrior’s death. In the metaphysical Arabian romance of Yokdhan, the hero seeks the source of life and thought, and discovers in one of the cavities of the heart a bluish vapour, which was the living soul. Among the Hebrews it was of shadowy nature, with echoless motion, haunting a ghostly realm:
“It is a land of shadows; yea, the land
Itself is but a shadow, and the race
That dwell therein are voices, forms of forms.”
Such conceptions are but little varied; and, to this day, the intelligence of the major number of people who think about the thing at all presents the departing soul as something vaporous, as a little white cloud.
In keeping with such ideas, the belief in transfer of spirit expresses itself. Algonquin women who desired to become mothers flocked to the couch of those about to die, in hope that the vital principle as it passed from the body would enter theirs. Among the Seminoles of Florida, when a woman died in childbirth, the infant was held over her face to receive her parting spirit, and thus acquire strength and knowledge for its future use. So among the Tákahlis, the priest is accustomed to lay his hand on the head of the nearest relative of the deceased, and to blow into him the soul of the departed, which is supposed to come to life in his next child.[81]
In Harland and Wilkinson’s Lancashire Folk-lore it is related that while a well-known witch lay dying, “she must needs, before she could ‘shuffle off this mortal coil,’ transfer her familiar spirit to some trusty successor. An intimate acquaintance from a neighbouring township was consequently sent for in all haste, and on her arrival was immediately closeted with her dying friend. What passed between them has never fully transpired, but it is asserted that at the close of the interview this associate received the witch’s last breath into her mouth, and with it her familiar spirit. The powers for good or evil of the dreaded woman were thus transferred to her companion, and on passing along the road from Burnley to Blackburn we can point out a farmhouse at no great distance, with whose thrifty matron no neighbouring farmer will yet dare to quarrel.” When a Roman lay at the point of death, his nearest relative inhaled the last breath; in New Testament story, the risen Jesus breathes on His disciples, that they may receive the Holy Spirit, and the form thus adopted in conferring supernatural grace is still used in the rites and ceremonies of the Catholic Church.
Speculation about the other self could not, however, stop at identifying it with a man’s breath or shadow, or with regarding it as absolutely impalpable. These nebulous and gaseous theories necessarily condensed, as it were, into theories of semi-substantiality still charged with ethereal conceptions, but giving embodiment to the soul to account for the appearances of both dead and living in dreams, when their persons were clasped, their forms and features seen, and their voices heard.
Such theories involve a kind of continuity of identity, and often take the form of belief in the soul as a replica of the body, and as suffering corresponding mutilation. When the native Australian has slain his foe, he cuts off his right thumb, so as to prevent him from throwing a shadowy spear; the Chinese dread of decapitation, lest their spirits are headless, is well known; but a more telling illustration is that cited by Dr. Tylor, from Waitz, of the West Indian planter, whose slaves sought refuge from the lash and toil in suicide. But he was too cunning for them; he cut off the heads and hands of the corpses, that the survivors might see that not even death could save them from a taskmaster who could maim their souls in the next world. Among advanced nations the same conceptions survived. Achilles, resting by the shore, sees the dead Patroclus in a dream. “Ay me, there remaineth then, even in the house of Hades, a spirit and phantom of the dead, albeit the life be not anywise therein; for all night long hath the ghost of hapless Patroclus stood over me, wailing and making moan, and wondrous like his living self it seemed.”[82] Virgil portrays Æneas, and Homer describes Ulysses, as recognising their old comrades when they enter the “viewless shades,” where the dwellers continue the tasks of their earthly life. In Hebrew legend Saul recognises the shade of Samuel when the magic spell of the Witch of Endor evokes it, although the grave of the old “judge” was sixty miles away. The monarch-shades of “Sheol” hail with derision the entrance of the King of Babylon among them. In New Testament narrative the risen Jesus is alternately material and spiritual, now passing through closed doors, and now submitting his wound-prints to the touch of the doubter. In Hamlet the ghost is as “the air, invulnerable,” yet “like a king” ...
“... that fair and warlike form
In which the majesty of buried Denmark
Did sometimes march.”
Notions of material punishments and rewards involved notions of a material soul, even pending its reunion with the body at the general resurrection. The angels are depicted as weighing souls in a literal balance, while devils clinging to the scales endeavour to disturb the equilibrium.[83] In some frescoes of the fourteenth century, on the walls of the Campo Santo, at Pisa, illustrations of these notions abound; the soul is portrayed as a sexless child rising out of the mouth of the corpse, and eagerly awaited as the crown of rejoicing of the angels, or as the lawful prey of the demons. After this it is amusing to learn that extreme tests of the weight of ghosts are now and then forthcoming,[84] from the assertion of a Basuto divine that the late queen had been bestriding his shoulders, and he never felt such a weight in his life, to the alleged modern spiritualistic reckoning of the weight of a human soul at from three to four ounces! And do not spirit-photographs adorn the albums of the credulous?