Thus, between the care taken to prevent returns of the corpse, and the worship paid to the ghost or shade, primitive races feel no such sense of discrepancy or incongruity as would instantly occur to civilised people.
The three stages in human ideas with which this chapter deals may be shortly summed up as corpse-worship, ghost-worship, and shade-worship.
CHAPTER IV.—THE ORIGIN OF GODS.
MR. Herbert Spencer has traced so admirably in his Principles of Sociology the progress of development from the Ghost to the God that I do not propose in this chapter to attempt much more than a brief recapitulation of his main propositions, which, however, I shall supplement with fresh examples, and adapt at the same time to the conception of three successive stages in human ideas about the Life of the Dead, as set forth in the preceding argument. But the hasty resume which I shall give at present will be fleshed out incidentally at a later point by consideration of several national religions.
In the earliest stage of all—the stage where the actual bodies of the dead are preserved,—Gods as such are for the most part unknown: it is the corpses of friends and ancestors that are worshipped and reverenced. For example, Ellis says of the corpse of a Tahitian chief that it was placed in a sitting posture under a protecting shed; “a small altar was erected before it, and offerings of fruit, food, and flowers were daily presented by the relatives, or the priest appointed to attend the body.” (This point about the priest is of essential importance.) The Central Americans, again, as Mr. Spencer notes, performed similar rites before bodies dried by artificial heat. The New Guinea people, as D’Albertis found, worship the dried mummies of their fathers and husbands. A little higher in the scale, we get the developed mummy-worship of Egypt and Peru, which survives even after the evolution of greater gods, from powerful kings or chieftains. Other evidence in abundance has been adduced from Polynesia and from Africa. Wherever the actual bodies of the dead are preserved, there also worship and offerings are paid to them.
Often, however, as already noted, it is not the whole body but the head alone that is specially kept and worshipped. Thus Mr. H. O. Forbes says of the people of Buru: “The dead are buried in the forest in some secluded spot, marked often by a merang or grave-pole; over which at certain intervals the relatives place tobacco, cigarettes, and various offerings. When the body is decomposed, the son or nearest relative disinters the head, wraps a new cloth about it, and places it in the Matakau at the back of his house, or in a little hut erected for it near the grave. It is the representative of his forefathers, whose behests he holds in the greatest respect.”
Two points are worthy of notice in this interesting account, as giving us an anticipatory hint of two further accessories whose evolution we must trace hereafter; first the grave-stake, which is probably the origin of the wooden idol; and second, the little hut erected over the head by the side of the grave, which is undoubtedly one of the origins of the temple or praying-house. Observe also the ceremonial wrapping of the skull in cloth, and its oracular functions.
Similarly, Mr. Wyatt Gill, the well-known missionary, writes of a dead baby at Boera, in New Guinea: “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.” And of the Suau people he says: “Enquiring the use of several small houses, I learned that it is to cover grave-pits. All the members of a family at death occupy the same grave, the earth that thinly covered the last occupant being scooped out to admit the newcomer. These graves are shallow; the dead are buried in a sitting posture, hands folded. The earth is thrown in up to the mouth only. An earthen pot covers the head. After a time the pot is taken off, the perfect skull removed and cleansed—eventually to be hung up in a basket or net inside the dwelling of the deceased over the fire, to blacken in the smoke.” In Africa, again, the skull is frequently preserved in such a pot and prayed to. In America, earthenware pots have been found moulded round human skulls in mounds at New Madrid and elsewhere; the skull cannot be removed without breaking the vessel. Indeed, this curious method of preservation in pots seems to be very widespread; we get perhaps a vague hint or reminiscence of its former prevalence in Europe in the story of Isabella and the pot of basil.