One word must be said in passing as to the frequent habit of specially preserving, and even carrying about the person, the head or hand of a deceased relative. This has been already mentioned in the case of Timurlaut; and it occurs frequently elsewhere. Thus Mr. Chalmers says of a New Guinea baby: “It will be covered with two inches of soil, the friends watching beside the grave; but eventually the skull and smaller bones will be preserved and worn by the mother.” Similarly, in the Andaman Islands, where we touch perhaps the lowest existing stratum of savage feeling, “widows may be seen with the skulls of their deceased partners suspended round their necks.” The special preservation of the head, even when the rest of the body is eaten or buried, will engage our attention at a later period: heads so preserved are usually resorted to as oracles, and are often treated as the home of the spirit. Mr. Herbert Spencer has collected many similar instances, such as that of the Tasmanians who wore a bone from the skull or arm of a dead relation. He rightly notes, too, that throughout the New World “the primitive conception of death as a long-suspended animation seems to have been especially vivid;” and we find accordingly that customs of this character are particularly frequent among American savages. Thus, to draw once more from his great storehouse, the Créés carried bones and hair of dead relations about for three years; while the Caribs and several Guiana tribes distributed the clean bones among the kinsmen of the deceased. In the Sandwich Islands, also, bones of kings and chiefs were carried about by their descendants, under the impression that the dead exercised guardianship over them.
At this stage of thought, it seems to me, it is the actual corpse that is still thought to be alive; the actual corpse that appears in dreams; and the actual corpse that is fed and worshipped and propitiated with presents.
Ceremonial cannibalism, which will be more fully considered hereafter, appears in this stratum, and survives from it into higher levels. The body is eaten entire, and the bones preserved; or the flesh and fat are removed, and the skin left; or a portion only is sacramentally and reverently eaten by the surviving relations. These processes also will be more minutely described in the sequel.
The first stage merges by gradual degrees into the second, which is that of Burial or its equivalent. Cave-burial of mummies or of corpses forms the transitional link. Indeed, inasmuch as many races of primitive men lived habitually in caves, the placing or leaving the corpse in a cave seems much the same thing as the placing or leaving it in a shed, hut, or shelter. The cave-dwelling Veddahs simply left the dead man in the cave where he died, and themselves migrated to some other cavern. Still, cave-burial lingered on late with many tribes or nations which had for ages outlived the habit of cave-dwelling. Among the South American Indians, cave-burial was common; and in Peru it assumed high developments of mummification. The making of an artificial cave or vault for the dead is but a slight variant on this custom; it was frequent in Egypt, the other dry country where the making of mummies was carried to a high pitch of perfection. The Tombs of the Kings at Thebes are splendid instances of such artificial caves, elaborated into stately palaces with painted walls, where the dead monarchs might pass their underground life in state and dignity. Cave-tombs, natural or artificial, are also common in Asia Minor, Italy, and elsewhere.
During the first stage, it may be noted, the attitude of man towards his dead is chiefly one of affectionate regard. The corpse is kept at home, and fed or tended; the skull is carried about as a beloved object. But in the second stage, which induces the practice of burial, a certain Fear of the Dead becomes more obviously apparent. Men dread the return of the corpse or the ghost, and strive to keep it within prescribed limits. In this stage, the belief in the Resurrection of the Body is the appropriate creed; and though at first the actual corpse is regarded as likely to return to plague survivors, that idea gives place a little later, I believe, to the conception of a less material double or spirit.
And here let us begin by discriminating carefully between the Resurrection of the Body and the Immortality of the Soul.
The idea of Resurrection arose from and is closely bound up with the practice of burial, the second and simpler mode of disposing of the remains of the dead. The idea of Immortality arose from and is closely bound up with the practice of burning, a later and better innovation, invented at the third stage of human culture. During the early historical period all the most advanced and cultivated nations burnt their dead, and, in consequence, accepted the more ideal and refined notion of Immortality. But modern European nations bury their dead, and, in consequence, accept, nominally at least, the cruder and grosser notion of Resurrection. Nominally, I say, because, in spite of creeds and formularies, the influence of Plato and other ancient thinkers, as well as of surviving ancestral ideas, has made most educated Europeans really believe in Immortality, even when they imagine themselves to be believing in Resurrection. Nevertheless, the belief in Resurrection is the avowed and authoritative belief of the Christian world, which thus proclaims itself as on a lower level in this respect than the civilised peoples of antiquity.
The earliest of these two ways of disposing of the bodies of the dead is certainly by burial. As this fact has recently been called in question, I will venture to enlarge a little upon the evidence in its favour. In point of time, burial goes back with certainty to the neolithic age, and with some probability to the palaeolithic. Several true interments in caves have been attributed by competent geologists to the earlier of these two periods, the first for which we have any sure warranty of man’s existence on earth. But, as I do not desire to introduce controversial matter of any sort into this exposition, I will waive the evidence for burial in the palaeolithic age as doubtful, and will merely mention that in the Mentone caves, according to Mr. Arthur Evans, a most competent authority, we have a case of true burial accompanied by neolithic remains of a grade of culture earlier and simpler than any known to us elsewhere. In other words, from the very earliest beginning of the neolithic age men buried their dead; and they continued to bury them, in caves or tumuli, down to the end of neolithic culture. They buried them in the Long Barrows in England; they buried them in the Ohio mounds; they buried them in the shadowy forests of New Zealand; they buried them in the heart of darkest Africa. I know of no case of burning or any means of disposal of the dead, otherwise than by burial or its earlier equivalent, mummification, among people in the stone age of culture in Europe. It is only when bronze and other metals are introduced that races advance to the third stage, the stage of cremation. In America, however, the Mexicans we*re cremationists.
The wide diffusal of burial over the globe is also a strong argument for its relatively primitive origin. In all parts of the world men now bury their dead, or did once bury them. From the Tombs of the Kings at Pekin to the Pyramids of Memphis; from the Peruvian caves to the Samoyed graveyards, we find most early peoples, most savage peoples, most primitive peoples, once or still engaged in one or other form of burying. Burial is the common and universal mode; burning, exposure, throwing into a sacred river, and so forth, are sporadic and exceptional, and in many cases, as among the Hindus, are demonstrably of late origin, and connected with certain relatively modern refinements of religion.
Once more, in many or most cases, we have positive evidence that where a race now burns its dead, it used once to bury them. Burial preceded burning in preheroic Greece, as it also did in Etruria and in early Latium. The people of the Long Barrows, in Western Europe generally, buried their dead; the people of the Round Barrows who succeeded them, and who possessed a far higher grade of culture, almost always cremated. It has been assumed that burning is primordial in India; but Mr. William Simpson, the well-known artist of the Illustrated London News, calls my attention to the fact that the Vedas speak with great clearness of burial as the usual mode of disposing of the corpse, and even allude to the tumulus, the circle of stones around it, and the sacred temenos which they enclose. According to Rajendralala Mitra, whose high authority on the subject is universally acknowledged, burial was the rule in India till about the thirteenth or fourteenth century before the Christian era; then came in cremation, with burial of the ashes, and this continued till about the time of Christ, when burial was dispensed with, and the ashes were thrown into some sacred river. I think, therefore, until some more positive evidence is adduced on the other side, we may rest content with our general conclusion that burial is the oldest, most universal, and most savage mode of disposing of the remains of the dead among humanity after the general recognition of death as a positive condition. It probably took its rise in an early period, while mankind was still one homogeneous species; and it has been dispersed, accordingly, over the whole world, even to the most remote oceanic islands.