Bancroft further describes ([3], p. 604 et seq.) a whole series of other ritual observances, many of which find close parallels in the scenes depicted in the royal Egyptian tombs of the New Empire.
I have already referred to Tylor’s case ([102]) of the adoption in toto by the Aztecs of the Japanese Buddhist’s story of the soul’s wanderings in the spirit-land. In the case recorded by Bancroft almost the same story is reproduced, but with the characteristic Egyptian additions relating to parts of the way guarded by a gigantic snake and an alligator respectively [in the Egyptian ritual it is of course the Crocodile; see Budge, “The Egyptian Heaven and Hell,” Vol. 1, p. 159]. This is a most remarkable example of syncretism between the Egyptian ritual of the New Empire with Buddhist practices on the distant shores of America.
As the connecting link between the Old and New World, it may be noted that in Oceania “everywhere is the belief that the soul after death must undertake a journey, beset with various perils, to the abode of departed spirits, which is usually represented as lying towards the west” ([61], p. 138).
Reutter ([63]) gives a summary of information relating to the practice of embalming in the New World and particularly amongst the Incas. The custom of preserving the body was not general in every case, for amongst certain peoples only the bodies of kings and chiefs were embalmed. The Indian tribes of Virginia, of North Carolina, the Congarees of South Carolina, the Indians of the North-West Coast, of Central America and those of Florida practised this custom as well as the Incas. In Florida the body was dried before a big fire, then it was clothed in rich materials and afterwards it was placed in a special niche in a cave where the relatives and friends used to come on special days and converse with the deceased. According to Beverley (1722) the tribes of Virginia practised embalming in the following way:—The skin was incised from the head to the feet and the viscera as well as the soft parts of the body were removed. To prevent the skin from drying up and becoming brittle oil and other fatty materials were applied to it. In Kentucky when the body had been dried and filled with fine sand it was wrapped in skins or in matting and buried either in a cave or in a hut. In Colombia the inhabitants of Darien used to remove the viscera and fill the body cavity with resin, afterwards they smoked the body and preserved it in their houses reposing either in a hammock or in a wooden coffin. The Muiscas, the Aleutians, the inhabitants of Yucatan and Chiapa also embalmed the bodies of their kings, of their chiefs, and of their priests by methods similar to those just described, with modifications varying from tribe to tribe. Reutter acknowledges as the source of most of his information the memoirs of Bauwenns, entitled “Inhumation et Cremation,” and Parcelly, “Étude Historique et Critique des Embaumements”; but most of it has clearly been obtained from Yarrow’s great monograph ([106]). Alone amongst the people of the New World who practised embalming the Incas employed it not only for their kings, chiefs and priests, but also for the population in general. These people were not confined to Peru, but dwelt also in Bolivia, in Equador, as well as in a part of Chili and of the Argentine. Mummified bodies were placed in monuments called Chullpas. According to De Morcoy these Chullpas were constructed of unbaked brick and were sometimes built in the form of a truncated pyramid, twenty to thirty feet high, in other cases simple mausolea of a simple monolith. The burial chamber inside them was square and as many as a dozen mummies might be buried in a single one. The bodies were sharply flexed and were placed in a sitting position. An interesting and curious fact about these mummies, or at any rate those from Upper Peru, was that all of them presented on the forehead or on the occiput a circle composed of small holes through the wall of the cranium, which had probably been used for evacuating the brain and for the introduction of preservative substances.
Yarrow ([106]) refers to the fact that the Indians of the North-West coast and the Aleutian Islands also embalm their dead. This, like the practice of tattooing (Buckland, [10]), serves to map out the possible alternative northern route taken by the spread of culture from Asia to America (vide supra the account of Aino embalming; also [Map II.]).
In his account of the Araucanos of Southern Chile (Journ. Roy. Anthr. Inst., Vol. 39, 1909, p. 364) Latcham describes how, when a person of importance dies of disease, these people believe that some one must have poisoned him. They “open the side of the deceased” and extract the gall-bladder, so as to obtain from the bile contained in it some clue as to the guilty person. “The corpse is then hung in a wicker frame and under it a fire is kept smouldering till such time as the perpetrator be found and punished.”
This confused jumble of practices suggestive of a blending of the influences of Egyptian embalming and Babylonian hepatoscopy is also obviously linked to the customs of Oceania and Indonesia.
Scattered in certain protected localities along the whole extent of the great “heliolithic” track the ancient Egyptian [also Chaldean and Indian] practice of burial in large urns or jars occurs. In America also it is found; but, according to Yarrow, it is restricted to certain people of New Mexico and California, although similar urns have been found in Nicaragua.
After the coming of the first great “heliolithic” wave, Asiatic civilization did not cease to influence America.
There are innumerable signs of the later effects of both Western and Eastern Asiatic developments. For instance, there is the coming of the practice of cremation. The fact that such burial customs are spread sporadically in the islands of the Pacific suggests that the custom may have been carried to America by the same route as the main stream of the “heliolithic” cult; but against this is the evidence that cremation was practised especially on the Pacific slope of the Rocky Mountains, and in Mexico rather than in Peru. It seems more probable that the main stream of the later wave of culture, of which cremation is the most distinctive practice, took the northern route skirting the eastern Asiatic littoral and then following the line of the Aleutian Islands.