The North-West Amazons: Notes of some months spent among cannibal tribes

by Thomas Whiffen

Temporarily disembodied spirits, that is to say the souls of living men, with power to send them forth out of their material bodies.

Extra-mundane spirits, or those from other worlds.

Spirits of, or in, all natural objects, animate and inanimate.

Any of these four classes of spirits are good or bad, according as they are benevolently or malevolently inclined.

These Indians all believe in the temporary transmission of the disembodied soul into the form of an animal, bird, or reptile, not a regular and enforced series of such transmissions. This temporary transmission is for the pursuance of a certain aim, perhaps for some indefinite length of time. It appears that the spirit has the power of transmigration into other animal bodies, or back again to its extra-mundane form at will. Whether the animal is human, whether, when so invaded, it incorporates two spirits and becomes dual-souled, the Indian does not relate.

Man’s soul in Indian belief is immortal, that is to say it exists as long as it is felt to exist, whilst it continues to appear in the dreams, in the thoughts of the survivors—for so long, in fact, as it is remembered. Surely this is immortality. A thing forgotten has never existed; and, per contra, the soul of a remembered being lives for ever. The disembodied spirit or ghost lingers near the body after death, in the woods near the house, or may even lodge in the house itself. And then indefinitely, indeterminately, after the body is buried the soul wanders farther afield, and goes at length to the happy grounds of the Good Spirit. Among some tribes this paradise is located above the skies, among others it is away up some river, in the far and mythical distance. The latter heaven is situated, as has already been mentioned, upstream, and that, in this country where the trend of the land is north-west and south-east, is also approximately towards the setting sun.[350]

This land of the After-Life is a diminutive replica of the ordinary world, but with evil things eliminated and joyful things emphasised. All is on a lower scale, stunted forests and pigmy game. This idea of a world in miniature approximates to the Malay conception of a spirit, the “diminutive but exact counterpart of its own embodiment,” appertaining to all animal, vegetable, and mineral bodies.[351] The Indian miniature world would thus be, it seems, constructed of the spirits of the material world. Colour is given to this theory by the fact that individual possessions are buried with the dead, and the Kuretu confess that this is done to prevent the return of the soul in search of them. Were such properties to pass into the possession of survivors the soul part of each object, needed to represent it in the spiritual world, would be detained in the material world. Burial sets it at liberty, presumably, to accompany the soul part of its owner, to take in the miniature world of the After-Life a position corresponding in every detail to that which has been held here on earth. The soul is pictured as the body, in miniature also, visible or invisible at will, for these people, like the majority of many of a higher culture, are unable to imagine the soul except in some material guise.[352] Life in this enigmatic sphere has everything most prized in this world. Hunting is fruitful always; women are beautiful and amenable, and the men are all the old familiar friends of earth. The means of attainment to this desirable state are so vague as to be unassignable. Good and evil have no part in this scheme of heavenly philosophy. Broken tabus, crimes against tribal jurisprudence, apparently bring only temporary evil influences into play. Their punishment is immediate and material. The happy land is open to all the tribe with whom the Good Spirit is not vexed. It is closed to all their enemies.

These lost souls, the spirits of those divinely damned, must still frequent the earthly forests, or perhaps ally themselves with the spirits of evil and wander down the holes in the earth to join the legions of the nether world.

I have heard, but not very definitely, of the Zaparo belief that the good and brave souls will pass into birds of beautiful plumage and feed on the most delicate fruits, while the bad and cowardly are condemned to a future existence in the guise of objectionable reptiles.[353]

This belief in, at least, a partial presence of the spirits of the dead has possibly a bearing on the Indian dislike, to use no stronger term, of mentioning his proper name. In the case of some tribes, as has been noted, the name of a dead man is given as a special honour to his greatest friend among the survivors. With other tribes names of the living may, and probably have once been those of persons now dead. To mention such a name aloud might conceivably be to attract the attention of the defunct erstwhile owner.[354] Therefore the name is only whispered, lest the spirit hearing it might come and bother the speaker or the individual named.[355] There is, of course, the further reason that the knowledge of a man’s name gives an enemy power to work him magical evil. But that is a point already dealt with, except in so far as it argues some identity of the name with the essential ego.