“Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.”
The Hottentot who avoids a dead man’s hut lest the ghost be within, is one with the believers in haunted houses, in banshees, wraiths, and spectres. Such as he should not be excluded as “corresponding members” of the Society for Psychical Research in the invitations[93] which its committee issues to folks who have seen apparitions, and slept, or tried to sleep, in the dreaded chamber of some moated hall of mystery.
If we look in vain for any consistency of idea or logical relation in barbaric notions, our wonder ceases at the absence of these when we note the conflicting conceptions entertained among intelligent people. But the underlying thought is identical. The examples given in a foregoing section on the belief in the passage of the soul into other human bodies, into animals and stones, strengthened as this is by the likeness in mind and body between children and dead relatives, by the human expression noted on many a brute, by the human shape of many a stone, show how the theory of the soul as nigh at hand finds many-sided support. In this belief, too, lie the germs of theories of successive transmigrations elaborated in the faiths of advanced races, when the defects of body and character were explained as the effects of sin committed in a former existence.
Next in order of conception appears to be that of the soul as living an independent existence, an improved edition of the present, in an under or upper world, into which the dead pass without distinction of caste or worth.
The things dreamed about respecting the land of spirits and their occupations are woven of the materials of daily life. Whether to the sleeping barbarian in his wigwam, or to the seer banished in Patmos; whether to the Indian travelling in his dreams to the happy hunting-ground, or to the apostle caught up in trance into paradise; earth, and earth alone, supplies the materials out of which man everywhere has shaped his heaven. Her dinted and furrowed surface; valleys and mountain-tops; islands sleeping in summer seas, or fretted by winter storms; cities walled and battlemented; glories of sunrise and sunset; gave variety enough for play of the cherished hopes and imaginings of men. If we collect any group of barbaric fancies, we find, speaking broadly, that a large proportion have pictured the home of souls as in the west, towards the land of the setting sun. Seen from many a standpoint to sink beneath river, lake, or ocean, which for untutored man enclosed his world, it led to the myth of waters of death dividing earth from heaven, which the soul, often at perilous risk, must cross. Such was the Ginnunga-gap of the Vikings; the nine seas and a half across which travellers to Manala, the under-world of the Finns, must voyage; the great water of the Red Indians; the Vaitarani of the Brahmans; the Stygian stream of the Greeks; and the Jordan of the Christians, that flows between us and the Celestial City, “where the surges cease to roll.” The sinking of the sun below the horizon obviously led to belief in an under-world, whither the ghosts went. Barbaric notions are full of this, and the lower culture out of which their beliefs arose is evidenced in the Orcus of the Romans, the Hades of the Greeks, the Helheim of the Norsemen, the Sheol of the Hebrews, and the Amenti of the Egyptians, the solar features of which last are clearly traceable in their doctrine. Among the Hebrews, Sheol (translated, curiously enough, thirty-one times as “grave,” and thirty-one times as “hell,” in our Authorised Version) was a vast cavernous space in which the shades of good and bad alike wandered—“the small and great are there, and the servant is free from his master.” It is akin in character to the Greek Hades, where they “wander mid shadows and shade, and wail by impassable streams.” As ideas of a Divine rule of the world grew, its manifestations in justice were looked for, and the mystery of iniquity, the wicked “flourishing like a green bay tree,” led to the conception of a future state, in which Lazarus and Dives would change places. Sheol thus became, on the one hand, a land of delight and repose for the faithful, and, on the other hand, one of punishment for the wicked.
Persian, and still older, influences had largely leavened Hebrew conceptions, and local conditions in Judea added pungent elements. The Valley of Hinnom, or Gehenna, “the place where lie the corpses of those who have sinned against Jehovah, where their worm shall not die, neither their fire be quenched;” the dreary volcanic region around the Dead Sea, with its legend of doomed cities, supplied their imagery of hell with its lake of fire and brimstone. And, as the belief travelled westward, it fell into congenial soil. The sulphurous stench around Lacus Avernus, the smoke of Vesuvius, Stromboli, and Etna, wreathed themselves round the hell of Christianity and the under-world of barbaric myth; and from Talmudic writer to classic poet, to Dante and to Milton, the imagination exhausted the material of the horrible to describe the several tortures of the damned. The hell of our northern forefathers remained below the flat earth, but the cold, misty Niflheim melted away before the fiery perdition of Christian dogma. And, in the region bordering thereon, the limbus patrum, the limbus infantum, etc., we have the survival of belief in separate hells characteristic of the Oriental religions, and of the sub-divisions of the lower world in more rudimentary religions.
Beyond the narrow horizon which bounded the world of the ancients, lay the imaginary land of the immortals, the Blessed, the Happy, the Fortunate Isles. But as that horizon enlarged, the Elysian Fields and Banquet Halls were transferred to an upper sphere. In the wonder aroused by the firmament above, with its solid-looking vault across which sun, stars, and clouds traversed; in the place it plays in dreams of barbarian and patriarch, when the sleeper is carried thither; in its brightness of noonday glory as contrasted with the dark sun-set under-world, we may find some of the materials of which the theory of an upper world, a heaven (“the heaved”) is made up. There the barbarian places his paradise to which the rainbow and the Milky Way are roads; there he meets his kindred, and lives where cold, disease, and age are not, but everlasting summer and summer fruits. There, too, for the conceptions of advanced races are drawn from the same sources, the civilised peoples of Europe and America have placed their heaven. And, save in refinement of detail incident to intellectual growth, there is nothing to choose between the earlier and the later; the same gross delights, the same earth-born ideas are there, whether we enter the Norseman’s Valhalla, the Moslem’s Paradise, or the Christian’s New Jerusalem.
§ XII.
CONCLUSIONS FROM THE FOREGOING.
It would exceed the limits and purport of this book to follow the extension of the belief in spirits to its extreme range; in other words, to belief in controlling spirits in inanimate objects, which were advanced pari passu with man’s advancing conceptions to place and rank as the higher gods of polytheism. Such belief, as already indicated, is the outcome of that primitive philosophy which invests the elements above and the earth beneath with departmental deities, until, through successive stages of dualism, the idea of a Supreme Deity is reached, and the approach is thus made towards a conception of the unity and unvarying order of nature. Deferring reference to the part played by dreams as media of communication between heaven and earth, and as warnings of coming events, let us summarise the evidence which has been gathered, and ask whether it warrants the conclusions drawn from it in the present work.