The last part of our inquiry has not been useless to our more immediate subject. It has not only shown us how consonant to other human institutions and human thoughts is the belief in the Life-token and the divisibility of the personality; but it has also furnished us with the reason why the life-token was left behind when the hero started on his adventures, why his brothers followed him, and why in many cases the slaughtered dragon found an avenger. The hero and his brothers were one body. The Medusa-witch, in striking him, struck them; and their plain duty was revenge. So likewise when the hero slew the dragon, the surviving kin of the dragon, whether mother or brother, must in return compass the hero’s death. Moreover, we may see in the same conception of life the reason why the mere appointment by a kinsman is sufficient to create a life-token for the hero. If the kinsman be of one body with the hero, separate yet united, his appointment would be equivalent to that of the hero himself. He could therefore at any time divine with accuracy as to the condition of his absent relative.
It is perhaps hardly necessary to insist on the universality of the chain of beliefs discussed in the present volume. I have tried to put before the reader instances from every quarter of the globe; and though of course I have not literally proved the beliefs to be universal, I think I have shown a distribution so wide and general as to induce a very strong presumption of their existence among tribes that have passed without mention, and even among tribes of whose culture and modes of thought we are as yet ignorant. A conception of life which we know to be held from the shores of the Arctic Ocean to the islands of the Southern Seas we may reasonably believe to be inseparable from human thought, at least until it has reached the highest levels of culture; and we may therefore predicate it with every probability not merely of living races whose traditions have yet to be explored, but also of the prehistoric dead whose barrows, dumb on this question, often betray only that other belief to which human nature clings everywhere so pathetically—the belief in the life after death. That belief, we may be sure, was not held alone. As we find it in man to-day, so doubtless it was to be found ages ago: only one of a cycle of beliefs which we may hope soon to be able to reconstruct, as the geologist builds again a primæval monster from a single bone.
[End of vol. II]
ENDNOTES
CHAPTER VIII NOTES
[4.1] Day, 71. Here what is probably the more archaic form of the incident, namely, the gift of the life-token to at least one of the kin, is preserved. The hero of one of Afanasief’s Russian tales gives a cup or basin to his six companions. When the cup fills with blood they are to come in search of him. ii. Rev. Trad. Pop., 376. The gift to other than a kinsman is rare; but it occurs in the story of Prince Lionheart, and in a Karen tale mentioned just below.
[5.1] Steel and Temple, 47.
[5.2] Day, 189; Siddhi-Kür, 55; Busk, Sagas, 106.
[5.3] i. Cosquin, 26, quoting xxxiv. Journ. As. Soc. Bengal, pt. 2, 225. In a Kabyle tale, apparently a variant of that given supra, vol. i. p. 60, the hero plants two rods, telling his half-brother to visit them every day: “if thou find mine dried up, know that I am dead.” De Charencey, Folklore, 142, citing René Basset, in vi. Giornale della Società asiatica italiana.
[5.4] ii. F.L. Journ., 52.