CHAPTER VIII
PROBLEMS OF LIFE AND DESTINY
"If a man die, shall he live again?" The question is as old as the Book of Job, but the affirmative answer is much older. The earliest human remains in Europe imply some provision for the dead, and it did not occur to the peoples of the lower culture all over the world to doubt the reality of some kind of continued existence. Did not the living still see them in their dreams (p. [86])?
But this life might be conceived in an infinite variety ol forms. Where was it passed? under what conditions? what would be its privileges and its requirements? how long would it last? To these and a hundred other questions no uniform answers have been returned; and numerous as are the stories of visits to the other world, there is little agreement as to its place, its scenery, its occupations, its society, its government, its duties, its punishments, or its rewards. Yet no field of human imagination reflects more clearly the stage of social and moral development which creates it. Into his pictures of the future man has persistently woven his criticism of the present. But the tenacity of usage and convention in everything affecting the dead has sometimes detained belief at a much lower level than the general progress of ethical feeling might otherwise have suggested. Religious thought does not always move forwards with equal speed over all the relations and possibilities of life.
The logic of the treatment of the dead is full of gaps and inconsistencies. The same people will perform rites which rest upon quite different theories; customs have run together in strange incoherence. This may be sometimes due to the necessity for making provision for different elements in the person which were united while on earth. The wealthy Egyptian required an elaborate home in the tomb for his double or ka, while his ba started on its perilous journey through the mysterious regions of the world of the dead. From the ethical point of view, however, which chiefly concerns the student of comparative religion, the doctrine of the next life falls into two main divisions, as Burton and Tylor pointed out more than a generation ago—theories of continuance, and theories of retribution. They are connected by many intermediate stages of transition, and they range all the way from the crudest conceptions of prolonged existence in the grave, up to exalted solemnities of judgment, of doom, and of the fellowship of heaven.
When a man dies, where will his spirit dwell? Perhaps it will pass into some animal, a bear, a walrus, or a beautiful bird. Perhaps it will haunt his old home. In that case it were well that he should not die where he has lived; let him be carried into the open air as death approaches, or laid in the loneliness of the woods. The Eskimo of Greenland build a small snow hut, the entrance of which is closed as death approaches that the inmate may pass away alone. Dr. Franz Boas relates that a young girl once sent for him from such a lodging a few hours before her end, to ask for some tobacco and bread, that she might take them to her mother who had died only a few weeks before. Or the connection between the dead man and his former dwelling may be severed by burning down the hut and forsaking the locality, even though (as among the Sakais of the Malay peninsula) the coming crop of tapioca or sugar-cane should be lost by departure. Or strong measures may be taken with the corpse by thrashing it to hasten the ejection of the soul; the walls of the death-chamber may be beaten with sticks to drive it away; or a professional functionary may be invoked with his broom to sweep it out. And when the body has been carried forth, precautions must be taken to prevent the spirit from finding its way back, and barriers erected against its return. Only occasionally, as in ancient Athens, was burial permitted in the house, where the venerated dead could still protect and bless those whom they loved.
The tomb was sometimes constructed to resemble the home and admit the members of the family together. Under the cliffs of Orvieto is an Etruscan city of the dead, where the stone houses (usually with two rooms) stand side by side in streets. The prehistoric gravemounds of Scandinavia have disclosed sepulchral burial chambers, entered by a gallery or passage, divided by large slabs of granite into alcoves or stalls, round which the dead were seated. Just so does the Eskimo of the present day arrange his dwelling. Those who had lived in caves and left their dead there, retained the usage long after they had learned to construct tents or build houses for themselves. The chief was carried to the hills, as the barrows on our own moors show, or to the mountain top, where his spirit blended perhaps with the spirit of the place and lent an additional awe to the heights; or to secure him from disturbance, as the Spanish observers noted in Columbia (S. America), a river was diverted from its course, his grave was made in its bed, and the waters, restored to their former channel, kept the secret safe.