In connection with this fear of the ancestor’s ghost hurting members of its own family, particularly children, I may remark it has several times been carefully explained to me that this “touching” comes not from malevolence, but from loneliness and the desire to have their company. A sentimental but inconvenient desire that the living human cannot give in to perpetually, though big men will accede to their ancestor’s desire for society by killing off people who may serve or cheer him. This desire for companionship is of course immensely greater in the spirit that is not definitely settled in the society of spiritdom, and it is therefore more dangerous to its own belongings, in fact to all living society, while it is hanging about the other side of the grave, but this side of Hades. Thus I well remember a delicious row that arose primarily out of trade matters, but which caused one family to yell at another family divers remarks, ending up with the accusation, “You good-for-nothing illegitimate offspring of house lizards, you don’t bury your ditto ditto dead relations, but leave them knocking about anyhow, a curse to Calabar.” Naturally therefore the spirit of a dead enemy is feared because it would touch for the purpose of getting spirit slaves; therefore it follows that powerful ancestors are valued when they are on the other side, for they can keep off the dead enemies. A great chief’s spirit is a thoroughly useful thing for a village to keep going, and in good order, for it conquered those who are among the dead with it, and can keep them under, keep them from aiding their people in the fights between its living relations and itself and them, with its slave spirit army. I ought to say that it is customary for the living to send the dead out ahead of the army, to bear the brunt in the first attack.
Ancestor-esteem you will find at its highest pitch in West Africa under the school of Fetish that rules the Tshi and Ewe peoples. Ellis gives you a full description of it for Ashanti and Dahomey.[18] The next district going down coast is the Yoruba one; but Yoruba has been so long under the influence of Mahometanism that its Fetish, judging from Ellis’s statement in his Yoruba Speaking People, is deeply tinged with it. I have no personal acquaintance with Yorubaland, but have no hesitation for myself in accepting his statements from the accuracy I have found them, by personal experience with Tshi and Ewe people, to possess. Below Yoruba comes a district, the Oil Rivers, where, alas, Ellis did not penetrate, and where no ethnologist, unless you will graciously extend the term to me, has ever cautiously worked.
In this district you have a school where reincarnation is strongly believed in, a different school of Fetish to that of Tshi and Ewe, a class of human ghosts called the well-disposed ones. And these are ancestors undoubtedly. They do not show up clearly in those districts where reincarnation is believed to be the common lot of all human souls. Nevertheless, they are clear enough even there, as I will presently attempt to explain.
These ancestor spirits have things given to them for their consolation and support, and in return they do what they can to benefit and guard their own villages and families. Nevertheless, the things given to the well-disposed ones are not as things sacrificed to gods. Nor are the well-disposed ones gods, even of the grade of a Sasabonsum or an Ombuiri. It is a low down thing to dig up your father—i.e., open his grave and take away the things in it that have been given him. It will get you cut by respectable people, and rude people when there is a market-place row on will mention it freely; but it won’t bring on a devastating outbreak of small-pox in the whole district.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] Of the Divine Law, Tractatus Theologico Politicus, Spinoza.
[11] Primitive Culture, E. B. Tylor, p. 144.
[12] Professor Tylor kindly allowed me to place this statement before him, and he says that as the word Fetish, with the sense of the use of bones, claws, stones, and such objects as receptacles of spiritual influences, has had nearly two centuries of established usage, it would not be easy to set it aside, and he advises me to use the term West African religion, or in some way make my meaning clear without expecting to upset the established nomenclature of comparative ethnology.
[13] This word is pronounced by the natives and by people knowing them, Cheuwe, as Ellis undoubtedly knew, but presumably he spelt it Tshi to please the authorities.
[14] The Vocation of the Hebrews, Spinoza.