[121] Texts to this effect abound. Fustel brought the more remarkable of them together in his Cité antique (p. 14). We shall be content with quoting three: "Son of Peleus," said Neoptolemus, "take this drink which is grateful to the dead; come and drink this blood" (Hecuba, 536). Electra says when she pours a libation: "This drink has penetrated the earth; my father has received it" (Choephorœ, 162). And listen to the prayer of Orestes to his dead father: "Oh my father, if I live thou shalt have rich banquets; if I die thou wilt have no portion of those smoking feasts which nourish the dead" (Choephorœ, 482-484). Upon the strange persistence of this belief, traces of which are still found in Eastern Europe, in Albania, in Thessaly, and Epirus, the works of Heuzey (Mission archéologique de Macédoine, p. 156), and Albert Dumont (le Balkan et l'Adriatique, pp. 354-356), may be consulted. Some curious details relating to the funeral feasts of the Chinese are to be found in the Comptes rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions, 1877, p. 325. There are some striking points of resemblance between the religion of China and that of ancient Egypt; in both one and the other the same want of power to develop may be found. Taking them as a whole, both the Chinese and the Egyptians failed to emerge from the condition of fetichism.
[122] In the eleventh book of the Odyssey it is only after "they have drunk deep draughts of black blood" that the shades are capable of recognising Ulysses, of understanding what he says and answering. The blood they swallowed restored their intelligence and powers of thought.
[123] The speeches of the Greek orators are full of proofs that these beliefs had a great hold upon the popular mind, even as late as the time of Demosthenes. In contested cases of adoption they always laid great stress upon the dangers which would menace the city if a family was allowed to become extinct for want of precautions against the failure of the hereditary line; there would then be some neglected tomb where the dead never received the visits of gift-bringing friends, a neglect which would be visited upon the city as a whole as the accomplice in such abandonment. Such an argument and others like it may not seem to us to be of great judicial value, but the talent of an Isæus understood how to make it tell with an audience, or we should not find it so often repeated in his pleadings (see G. Perrot, L'Éloquence politique et judiciare à Athènes. Les Précurseurs de Demosthène, pp. 359-364).
[124] Seventh edition, Hachette, 18mo., 1879.
[125] Mr. Herbert Spencer, in his ingenious and subtle analysis of primitive ideas draws our attention to their frequent inconsistencies and even positive contradictions; but he shows us at the same time that the most highly civilised races in these modern days admit and combine ideas which are logically quite as irreconcilable as those which seem to us so absurdly inconsistent when we think of the beliefs of the ancients or of savage races. Custom renders us insensible to contradictions which we should perceive at once were we removed to a distance from them. (The Principles of Sociology, vol. i. pp. 119, 185).
[126] The texts also bear witness to the ideas with which the complicated processes of embalming were undertaken. See P. Pierret, Le Dogme de la la Résurrection, &c., p. 10. "It was necessary that no member, no substance, should be wanting at the final summons; resurrection depended on that." "Thou countest thy members which are complete and intact." (Egyptian funerary text.) "Arise in To-deser (the sacred region in which the renewal of life is prepared), thou august and coffined mummy. Thy bones and thy substance are re-united with thy flesh, and thy flesh is again in its place; thy head is replaced upon thy neck, thy heart is ready for thee." (Osirian statue in the Louvre.) The dead took care to demand of the gods "that the earth should not bite him, that the soil should not consume him." (Mariette, Feuilles d'Abydos.) The preservation of the body must therefore have been an object of solicitude at the earliest times, but the art of embalming did not attain perfection until the Theban period. Under the ancient empire men were content with comparatively simple methods. Mariette says that "more examples would have to be brought together than he had been able to discover before the question of mummification under the ancient empire could be decided. It is certain, first, that no authentic piece of mummy cloth from that period is now extant; secondly, that the bones found in the sarcophagi have the brownish colour and the bituminous smell of mummies.
"Not more than five or six inviolate sarcophagi have been found. On each of these occasions the corpse has been discovered in the skeleton state. And as for linen, nothing beyond a little dust upon the bottom of the sarcophagus, which might be the débris of many other things than of a linen shroud." (Les Tombes de l'Ancien Empire, p. 16.)
[127] Passalacqua gives the following description of the mummy of a young woman which he discovered at Thebes: "Her hair and the rotundity and surprising regularity of her form showed me that she had been a beauty in her time, and that she had died in the flower of her youth." He then gives a minute description of her condition and ornaments, and concludes by saying that "the peculiar beauty of the proportions of this mummy, and its perfect preservation, had so greatly impressed the Arabs themselves that they had exhumed it more than once to show to their wives and neighbours." (Catalogue raisonné et historique des Antiquités découvertes en Égypte, 8vo. 1826.)
[128] Rhind describes several mummy-pits in the necropolis of Thebes which receive the water of the Nile by infiltration; but, as he himself remarks, this is because those who dug them did not foresee the gradual raising of the valley, and, consequently, of the level attained in recent ages by the waters of the Nile. It is doubtless only within the last few centuries that the water has penetrated into these tombs. (Thebes, its Tombs and their Tenants, p. 153.)
[129] Maspero, Conférence, p. 381.