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Tylor, Edward Burnett, Sir, 1832-1917
"Primitive culture : researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, language, art, and custom"
CHAPTER XII.
ANIMISM (continued).
Doctrine of Soul's Existence after Death ; its main divisions, Trans-
migration and Future Life Transmigration of Souls : re-birth in
Human and Animal Bodies, transference to Plants and Objects
Resurrection of Body : scarcely held in savage religion Future
Life : a general if not universal doctrine of low races Continued
existence, rather than Immortality ; second death of Soul Ghost
of Dead remains on earth, especially if corpse unburied ; its
attachment to bodily remains Feasts of the Dead .
В CHAPTER XII.
ANIMISM (continued).
Doctrine of Soul's Existence after Death ; its main divisions, Transmigra-
tion and Future Life Transmigration of Souls : re-birth in Human
and Animal Bodies, transference to Plants and Objects Resurrection
of Body : scarcely held in savage religion Future Life : a general
if not universal doctrine of low races Continued existence, rather
than Immortality ; second death of Soul Ghost of Dead remains
on earth, especially .if corpse unburied ; its attachment to bodily
remains Feasts of the Dead.
HAVING thus traced upward from the lower levels of cul-
ture the opinions of mankind as to the souls, spirits, ghosts,
or phantoms, considered to belong to men, to the lower
animals, to plants, and to things, we are now prepared to
investigate one of thegreat religious doctrines of the world,
the belief in th& soul's^ontinued existence in a Life after
Death. Here let us~once more call to mind the considera-
tion which cannot be too strongly put forward, that the
doctrine of a Future Life as held by the lower races is the
all but necessary outcome of savage Animism. The evi-
dence that the lower races believe the figures of the dead
seen in dreams and visions to be their surviving souls, not
only goes far to account for the comparative universality of
their belief in the continued existence of the soul after the
death of the body, but it gives the key to many of their
speculations on the nature of this existence, speculations
2 ANIMISM.
rational enough from the savage point of view, though apt
to seem far-fetched absurdities to moderns in their much
changed intellectual condition. The belief in a Future Life
falls into two main divisions. Closely connected and even
largely overlapping one another, both world-wide in their
distribution, both ranging back in time to periods of un-
known antiquity, both deeply rooted in the lowest strata of
human life which lie open to our observation, these two
doctrines have in the modern world passed into wonderfully
different conditions. The one is the theory of the Trans-
migration of Souls, which has indeed risen from its lower
stages to establish itself among the huge religious communi-
ties of Asia, great in history, enormous even in present
mass, yet arrested and as it seems henceforth unprogressive
in development ; but the more highly educated world has
rejected the ancient belief, and it now only survives in
Europe in dwindling remnants. Far different has been the
history of the other doctrine, that of the independent exist-
ence of the personal soul after the death of the body, in a
Future Life. Passing onward^hrough change after change
in the condition of the human race, modified and renewed
in its long ethnic course, this great belief may be traced
from its crude and primitive manifestations among savage
races to its establishment in the heart of modern religion,
where the faith in a future existence forms at once an
inducement to goodness, a sustaining hope through suffer-
ing and across the fear of death, and an answer to the per-
plexed problem of the allotment of happiness and misery
in this present world, by the expectation of another world
to set this right.
In investigating the doctrine of Transmigration, it will
be well first to trace its position among the lower races, and
afterwards to follow its developments, so far as they extend
in the higher civilization. The temporary migration of
souls into material substances, from human bodies down to
morsels of wood and stone, is a most important part of the
lower psychology. But it does not relate to the continued
TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS. 3
existence of the soul after death, and may be more conve-
niently treated of elsewhere, in connexion with such sub-
jects as daemoniacal possession and fetish- worship. We
are here concerned with the more permanent tenancy of
souls for successive lives in successive bodies.
Permanent transition, new birth, or re-incarnation of
human souls in other human bodies, is especially con-
sidered to take place by the soul of a deceased person
animating the body of an infant. It is recorded by
Brebeuf that the Hurons, when little children died, would
bury them by the wayside, that their souls might enter into
mothers passing by, and so be born again. 1 In North- West
America, among the Tacullis, we hear of direct transfusion
of soul by the medicine-man, who, putting his hands on the
breast of the dying or dead, then holds them over the head
of a relative and blows through them ; the next child born
to this recipient of the departed soul is animated by it, and
takes the rank and name of the deceased. 2 The Nutka
Indians not without ingenuity accounted for the existence
of a distant tribe speaking the same language as them-
selves, by declaring them to be the spirits of their dead. 3 In
Greenland, where the wretched custom of abandoning and
even plundering widows and orphans was tending to bring
the whole race to extinction, a helpless widow would seek
to persuade some father that the soul of a dead child of his
had passed into a living child of hers, or vice versa, thus
gaining for herself a new relative and protector. 4 It is
mostly ancestral or kindred souls that are thought to enter
into children, and this kind of transmigration is therefore
from the savage point of view a highly philosophical theory,
accounting as it does so well for the general resemblance
between parents and children, and even for the more special
1 Brebeuf in ' Rel. des Je"s. dans la Nouvelle France,' 1636, p. 130 ; Charle-
voix, ' Nouvelle France,' vol. vi. p. 75. See Brinton, p. 253.
* Waitz,vol.iii.p. 195, seep. 213. Morse, ' Report onlndian Affairs,' p. 345.
3 Mayne, ' British Columbia,' p. 181.
* Cranz, 'Gronland,' pp. 248, 258, see p. 212. See also Turner, 'Polynesia.'
P 353 > Meiners, vol. ii. p. 793.
4 ANIMISM.
phenomena of atavism. In North- West America, among
the Koloshes, the mother sees in a dream the deceased
relative whose transmitted soul will give his likeness to the
child j 1 and in Vancouver's Island in 1860 a lad was much
regarded by the Indians because he had a mark like the
scar of a gun-shot wound on his hip, it being believed that
a chief dead some four generations before, who had such a
mark, had returned.* In Old Calabar, if a mother loses a
child, and another is born soon after, she thinks the departed
one to have come back. 3 The Wanika consider that the
soul of a dead ancestor animates a child, and this is why
it resembles its father or mother ;* in Guinea a child bear-
ing a strong resemblance, physical or mental, to a dead
relative, is supposed to have inherited his soul ; 5 and the
Yorubas, greeting a new-born infant with the salutation,
' Thou art come ! ' look for signs to show what ancestral
soul has returned among them. 6 Among the Khonds of
Orissa, births are celebrated by a feast on the seventh day,
and the priest, divining by dropping rice-grains in a cup of
water, and judging from observations made on the person
of the infant, determines which of his progenitors has reap-
peared, and the child generally at least among the northern
tribes receives the name of that ancestor. 7 In Europe the
Lapps repeat an instructive animistic idea just noticed in
America ; the future mother was told in a dream what
name to give her child, this message being usually given by
the very spirit of the deceased ancestor, who was about to
be incarnate in her. 8 Among the lower races generally the
1 Bastian, ' Psychologic,' p. 28.
* Bastian, 'Zur vergl. Psychologic,' in Lazarus and Steinthal's 'Zeit-
schrift,' vol. v. p. 160, &c., also Papuas and other races.
3 Burton, ' W. & W. fr. W. Afr.' p. 376.
4 Krapf, ' E. Afr.' p. 201.
8 J. L. Wilson, 'W. Afr.' p. 210; see also R. Clarke, 'Sierra Leone,
p. 159.
8 Bastian, 1. c.
7 Macpherson, p. 72 ; also Tickell in ' Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,' vol. ix.
pp. 793, &c. ; Dalton in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. vi. p. 22 (similar rite of Mun-
das and Oraons).
Klemm, ' C. G.' vol. iii. p 77 ; K. Leems, ' Lapper,' c. xiv.
TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS. 5
renewal of old family names by giving them to new-born
children may always be suspected of involving some such
thought. The following is a curious pair of instances from
the two halves of the globe. The New Zealand priest
would repeat to the infant a long list of names of its
ancestors, fixing upon that name which the child by sneez-
ing or crying when it was uttered, was considered to select
for itself ; while the Cheremiss in Russia would shake the
baby till it cried, and then repeat names to it, till it chose
itself one by leaving off crying. 1
The belief in the new human birth of the departed soul,
which has even led West African negroes to commit suicide
when in distant slavery, that they may revive in their own
land, in fact amounts among several of the lower races to a
distinct doctrine of an earthly resurrection. One of the
most remarkable forms which this belief assumes is when
dark-skinned races, wanting some reasonable theory to
account for the appearance among them of human crea-
tures of a new strange sort, the white men, and struck with
their pallid deathly hue combined with powers that seem
those of superhuman spiritual beings, have determined that
the manes of their dead must have come back in this
wondrous shape. The aborigines of Australia have ex-
pressed this theory in the simple formula, ' Blackfellow
tumble down, jump up Whitefellow.' Thus a native who
was hanged years ago at Melbourne expressed in his last
moments the hopeful belief that he would jump up White-
fellow, and have lots of sixpences. The doctrine has been
current among them since early days of European inter-
course, and in accordance with it they habitually regarded
the Englishmen as their own deceased kindred, come back
to their country from an attachment to it in a former life.
Real or imagined likeness completed the delusion, as when
1 R. Taylor, ' New Zealand,' p. 284 ; see Shortland, ' Traditions,'
p. 145 ; Turner, ' Polynesia,' p. 353 ; Bastian, ' Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 279 ;
see also p. 276 (Samoyeds). Compare Charlevoix, 'Nouvelle France,'
vol. v. p. 426; Steller, ' Kamtschatka,' p. 353 ; Kracheninnikow, ii. 117.
See Plath, ' Rel. der alten Chinesen,' ii. p. 98.
6 ANIMISM.
Sir George Grey was hugged and wept over by an old
woman who found in him a son she had lost, or when a
convict, recognized as a deceased relative, was endowed
anew with the land he had possessed during his former life.
A similar theory may be traced northward by the Torres
Islands to New Caledonia, where the natives thought the
white men to be the spirits of the dead who bring sickness,
and assigned this as their reason for wishing to kill white
men. 1 In Africa, again, the belief is found among the
Western negroes that they will rise again white, and the
Bari of the White Nile, believing in the resurrection of the
dead on earth, considered the first white people they saw as
departed spirits thus come back.*
Next, the lower psychology, drawing no definite line of
demarcation between souls of men and of beasts, can at
least admit without difficulty the transmission of human
souls into the bodies of the lower animals. A series of
examples from among the native tribes of America will
serve well to show the various ways in which such ideas are
worked out. The Ahts of Vancouver's Island consider the
living man's soul able to enter into other bodies of men
and animals, going in and out like the inhabitant of a
house. In old times, they say, men existed in the forms of
birds, beasts, and fishes, or these had the spirits of the
Indians in their bodies ; some think that after death they
will pass again into the bodies of the animals they occupied
in this former state. 8 In an Indian district of North- West
1 Grey, ' Australia,' vol. i. p. 301, vol. ii. p. 363 [native's accusation against
some foreign sailors who had assaulted him, ' djanga Taal-wurt kyle-gut
bomb-gur,' ' one of the dead struck Taal-wurt under the ear,' &c. The
word <i/<zga=the dead, the spirits of deceased persons (see Grey, 'Vocab. of
S. W. Australia '), had come to be the usual term for a European]. Lang,
' Queensland,' pp. 34, 336 ; Bonwick, ' Tasmanians," p. 183 ; Scherzer, ' Voy.
of Novara,' vol. iii. p. 34 ; Bastian, ' Psychologic,' p. 222, ' Mensch,' vol. Hi.
pp. 362-3, and in Lazarus and Steinthal's ' Zeitschrift,' 1. c. ; Turner, ' Poly-
nesia,' p. 424.
2 Romer, 'Guinea,' p. 85 ; Brun-Rollet, ' Nil Blanc,' &c. p. 234.
3 Sproat, 'Savage Life,' ch. xviii., xix., xxi. Souls of the dead appear
in dreams, either in human or animal forms, p. 174. See also Brinton,
p. 145.
TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS. 7
California, we find natives believing the spirits of their dead
to enter into bears, and travellers have heard of a tribe
begging the life of a wrinkle-faced old she grizzly bear as
the recipient of the soul of some particular grandam, whom
they fancied the creature to resemble. 1 So, among the
Esquimaux, a traveller noticed a widow who was living for
conscience' sake upon birds, and would not touch walrus-
meat, which the angekok had forbidden her for a time,
because her late husband had entered into a walrus. 2
Among other North American tribes, we hear of the Pow-
hatans refraining from doing harm to certain small wood-
birds which received the souls of their chiefs ; 3 of Huron
souls turning into turtle-doves after the burial of their bones
at the Feast of the Dead; 4 of that pathetic funeral rite of
the Iroquois, the setting free a bird on the evening of
burial, to carry away the soul. 8 In Mexico, the Tlascalans
thought that after death the souls of nobles would animate
beautiful singing birds, while plebeians passed into weasels
and beetles and such like vile creatures. 6 So, in Brazil,
the I$annas say that the souls of the brave will become
beautiful birds, feeding on pleasant fruits, but cowards will
be turned into reptiles. 7 Among the Abipones we hear of
certain little ducks which fly in flocks at night, uttering a
mournful hiss, and which fancy associates with the souls of
the dead ; 8 while in Popayan it is said that doves were not
killed, as inspired by departed souls. 9 Lastly, transmigra-
tion into brutes is also a received doctrine in South America
as when a missionary heard a Chiriquane woman of western
1 Schoolcraft, ' Indian Tribes,' part iii. p. 113.
8 Hayes, 'Arctic Boat Journey,' p. 198.
3 Brinton, ' Myths of New World,' p. 102.
4 Brebeuf in ' Rel. des Jes.' 1636, p. 104.
5 Morgan, ' Iroquois,' p. 174.
4 Clavigero, ' Messico,' vol. ii. p. 5.
7 Martius, ' Ethnog. Amcr.' vol. i. p. 602 ; Markham in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.'
vol. iii. p. 195.
8 Dobrizhoffer, ' Abipones,' vol. ii. pp. 74, 270.
8 Coreal in Brinton, 1. c. See also J. G. Miillcr, pp. 139 (Natchez), 223
(Caribs), 402 (Peru).
8 ANIMISM.
Brazil say of a fox, ' May not that be the spirit of my dead
daughter ? ' l
In Africa, again, mention is made of the Maravi thinking
that the souls of bad men became jackals, and of good men
snakes.* The Zulus, while admitting that a man may turn
into a wasp or lizard, work out in the fullest way the idea
of the dead becoming snakes, a creature whose change of
skin has so often been associated with the thought of re-
surrection and immortality. It is especially certain green
or brown harmless snakes, which come gently and fearlessly
into houses, which are considered to be ' amatongo ' or
ancestors, and therefore are treated respectfully, and have
offerings of food given them. In two ways, the dead man
who has become a snake can still be recognized ; if the
creature is one-eyed, or has a scar or some other mark, it is
recognized as the ' itongo ' of a man who was thus marked
in life ; but if he had no mark the ' itongo ' appears in
human shape in dreams, thus revealing the personality of
the snake. 3 In Guinea, monkeys found near a graveyard
are supposed to be animated by the spirits of the dead, and
in certain localities monkeys, crocodiles, and snakes, being
thought men in metempsychosis, are held sacred. 4 It is to
be borne in mind that notions of this kind may form in
barbaric psychology but a portion of the wide doctrine of
the soul's future existence. For a conspicuous instance of
this, let us take the system of the Gold-Coast negroes.
They believe that the ' kla ' or ' kra,' the vital soul,
becomes at death a ' sisa ' or ghost, which can remain in
the house with the body, plague the living, and cause sick-
ness, till it departs or is driven by the sorcerer to the bank
of the River Volta, where the ghosts build themselves
houses and dwell. But they can and do come back from
1 Chome' in ' Lettres Edif.' vol. viii. ; see also Martius, vol. i. p. 446.
* Waitz, vol. ii. p. 419 (Maravi).
3 Callaway, ' Rel. of Amazulu,' p. 196, &c. ; Arbousset and Daumas,
p. 237.
4 J. L. Wilson, ' W. Afr.' pp. 210, 218. See also Brun-Rollet, pp. 200,
234 ; Meiners, vol. i. p. 211.
TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS. 9
this Land of Souls. They can be born again as souls in
new human bodies, and a soul who was poor before will now
be rich. Many will not come back as men, but will become
animals. To an African mother who has lost her child, it
is a consolation to say, ' He will come again/ 1
In higher levels of culture, the theory of re-embodiment
of the soul appears in strong and varied development.
Though seemingly not received by the early Aryans, the
doctrine of migration was adopted and adapted by Hindu
philosophy, and forms an integral part of that great system
common to Brahmanism and Buddhism, wherein successive
births or existences are believed to carry on the consequences
of past and prepare the antecedents of future life. To the
Hindu the body is but the temporary receptacle of the soul,
which, ' bound in the chains of deeds ' and ' eating the
fruits of past actions,' promotes or degrades itself along a
series of embodiments in plant, beast, man, deity. Thus
all creatures differ rather in degree than kind, all are akin
to man, an elephant or ape or worm may once have been
human, and may become human again, a pariah or barbar-
ian is at once low-caste among men and high-caste among
brutes. Through such bodies migrate the sinful souls
which desire has drawn down from primal purity into gross
material being ; the world where they do penance for the
guilt incurred in past existences is a huge reformatory, and
life is the long grievous process of developing evil into
good. The rules are set forth in the book of Manu how
souls endowed with the quality of goodness acquire divine
nature, while souls governed by passion take up the human
state, and souls sunk in darkness are degraded to brutes.
Thus the range of migration stretches downward from gods
andsaints, through holy ascetics, Brahmans, nymphs, kings,
counsellors, to actors, drunkards, birds, dancers, cheats,
elephants, horses, Sudras, barbarians, wild beasts, snakes,
worms, insects, and inert things. Obscure as the relation
mostly is between the crime and its punishment in a new
1 Steinhauter in ' Mag. der Evang. Mitt/ Batel, 1856, No. 2, p. 135.
II.
10 ANIMISM.
life, there may be discerned through the code of penal
transmigration an attempt at appropriateness of penalty,
and an intention to punish the sinner wherein he sinned.
For faults committed in a previous existence men are
afflicted with deformities, the stealer of food shall be
dyspeptic, the scandal-monger shall have foul breath, the
horse-stealer shall go lame, and in consequence of their
deeds men shall be born idiots, blind, deaf and dumb, mis-
shaped, and thus despised of good men. After expiation of
their wickedness in the hells of torment, the murderer of a
Brahman may pass into a wild beast or pariah ; he who
adulterously dishonours his guru or spiritual father shall
be a hundred times re-born as grass, a bush, a creeper, a
carrion bird, a beast of prey ; the cruel shall become blood-
thirsty beasts ; stealers of grain and meat shall turn into
rats and vultures ; the thief who took dyed garments,
kitchen-herbs, or perfumes, shall become accordingly a red
partridge, a peacock, or a musk-rat. In short, ' in what-
ever disposition of mind a man accomplishes such and such
an act, he shall reap the fruit in a body endowed with such
and such a quality.' 1 The recognition of plants as possible
receptacles of the transmigrating spirit well illustrates the
conception of souls of plants. The idea is one known to
lower races in a district of the world which has been under
Hindu influence. Thus we hear among the Dayaks of
Borneo of the human soul entering the trunks of trees,
where it may be seen damp and blood-like, but no longer
personal and sentient, or of its being re-born from an animal
which has eaten of the bark, flower, or fruit; 1 and the
Santals of Bengal are said to fancy that uncharitable men
and childless women are eaten eternally by worms and
snakes, while the good enter into fruit-bearing trees. 8
But it is an open question how far these and the Hindu
1 Manu, xi. xii. Ward, ' Hindoos,' vol. i. p. 164, vol. ii. pp. 215, 347-52.
* St. John, ' Far East,' vol. i. p. 181 ; Perelaer, ' Ethnog, Beschr. der
Dajaks,' p. 17.
8 Hunter, ' Rural Bengal,' p. 210. See also Shaw in ' As. Res.' vol. iv.
p. 46 (Rajmahal tribes).
TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS. H
ideas of vegetable transmigration can -be considered as
independent. A curious commentary on the Hindu work-
ing out of the conception of plant-souls is to be found in a
passage in a 17th-century work, which describes certain
Brahmans of the Coromandel Coast as eating fruits, but
being careful not to pull the plants up by the roots, lest
they should dislodge a soul ; but few, it is remarked, are
so scrupulous as this, and the consideration has occurred
to them that souls in roots and herbs are most vile and
abject bodies, so that if dislodged they may become better
off by entering into the bodies of men or beasts. 1 More-
over, the Brahmanic doctrine of souls transmigrating into
inert things has in like manner a bearing on the savage
theory of object-souls. 2
Buddhism, like the Brahmanism from which it seceded,
habitually recognized transmigration between superhuman
and human beings and the lower animals, and in an ex-
ceptional way recognized a degradation even into a plant or
a thing. How the Buddhist mind elaborated the doctrine
of metempsychosis, may be seen in the endless legends of
Gautama himself undergoing his 550 births, suffering pain
and misery through countless ages to gain the power of
freeing sentient beings from the misery inherent in all
existence. Four times he became Maha Brahma, twenty
times the dewa Sekra, and many times or few he passed
through such stages as a hermit, a king, a rich man, a slave,
a potter, a gambler, a curer of snake bites, an ape, an
elephant, a bull, a serpent, a snipe, a fish, a frog, the dewa
or genius of a tree. At last, when he became the supreme
Buddha, his mind, like a vessel overflowing with honey,
overflowed with the ambrosia of truth, and he proclaimed
his triumph over life :
1 Abraham Roger, ' La Porte Ouverte,' Amst. 1670, p. 107.
2 Manu, xii. 9 : ' ?arirajaih karmmadoshaih yati stria varatam narah '
' for crimes done in the body, the man goes to the inert (motionless)
state;' xii. 4Z, 'sthavarah krimakitaccha matsyah sarpah sakachhapah
pac.ava^cha mrigaschaiva jaghanya tamasi gatih ' ' inert (motionless)
things, worms and ir.sects, fish, serpents, tortoises and beasts and deer
also are the last dark form.'
12 ANIMISM
' Painful are repeated births.
house-builder ! I have seen thee,
Thou canst not build again a house for me.
Thy rafters are broken
Thy roof-timbers are shattered.
My mind is detached,
1 have attained to the extinction of desire.'
Whether the Buddhists receive the full Hindu doctrine of
the migration of the individual soul from birth to birth, or
whether they refine away into metaphysical subtleties the
notion of continued personality, they do consistently and
systematically hold that a man's life in former existences is
the cause of his now being what he is, while at this moment
he is accumulating merit or demerit whose result will
determine his fate in future lives. Memory, it is true, fails
generally to recall these past births, but memory, as we
know, stops short of the beginning even of this present life.
When King Bimsara's feet were burned and rubbed with salt
by command of his cruel son that he might not walk, why
was this torture inflicted on a man so holy ? Because in
a previous birth he had walked near a dagoba with his
slippers on, and had trodden on a priest's carpet without
washing his feet. A man may be prosperous for a time on
account of the merit he has received in former births, but
if he does not continue to keep the precepts, his next birth
will be in one of the hells, he will then be born in this world
as a beast, afterwards as a preta or sprite ; a proud man
may be born again ugly with large lips, or as a demon or a
worm. The Buddhist theory of ' karma ' or ' action,'
which controls the destiny of all sentient beings, not by
judicial reward and punishment, but by the inflexible result
of cause into effect, wherein the present is ever determined
by the past in an unbroken line of causation, is indeed one
of the world's most remarkable developments of ethical
speculation. 1
1 KCppen, ' Religion des Buddha,' vol. i. pp. 35, 289, &c., 318; Barthelemy
Saint-Hilaire, ' Le Bouddha et sa Religion,' p. 122 ; Hardy, ' Manual of
Budhiim,' pp. 98, Ac., 180, 318, 445, &c.
TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS. 13
Within the classic world, the ancient Egyptians were
described as maintaining a doctrine of migration, whether
by successive embodiments of the immortal soul through
creatures of earth, sea, and air, and back again to man, or
by the simpler judicial penalty which sent back the wicked
dead to earth as unclean beasts. 1 The pictures and
hieroglyphic sentences of the Book of the Dead, however,
do not afford the necessary confirmation for these state-
ments, even the mystic transformations of the soul not
being of the nature of transmigrations. Thus it seems that
the theological centre whence the doctrine of moral metem-
psychosis may have spread over the ancient cultured
religions, must be sought elsewhere than in Egypt. In
Greek philosophy, great teachers stood forth to proclaim
the doctrine in a highly developed form. Plato had mythic
knowledge to convey of souls entering such new incarna-
tions as their glimpse of real existence had made them fit
for, from the body of a philosopher or a lover down to the
body of a tyrant and usurper ; of souls transmigrating into
beasts and rising again to man according to the lives they
led ; of birds that were light-minded souls ; of oysters
suffering in banishment the penalty of utter ignorance.
Pythagoras is made to illustrate in his own person his
doctrine of metempsychosis, by recognizing where it hung
in Here's temple the shield he had carried in a former
birth, when he was that Euphorbos whom Menelaos slew
at the siege of Troy. Afterwards he was Hermotimos, the
Klazomenian prophet whose funeral rites were so pre-
maturely celebrated while his soul was out, and after that,
as Lucian tells the story, his prophetic soul passed into the
body of a cock. Mikyllos asks this cock to tell him about
Troy were things there really as Homer said ? But the
cock replies, ' How should Homer have known, O Mikyllos?
When the Trojan war was going on, he was a camel in
Baktria ! '
1 Herod, ii. 123, ice Rawlinson't Tr. ; Plutarch. De Iiide 31, 72 ; Wilkin-
son, ' Ancient Eg.' vol. ii. ch. xvi.
1 Plat. Phardo, Timu, Phardru>, Rcpub.; Diog. Lacrt. Empedokles xii.;
14 ANIMISM.
In the later Jewish philosophy, the Kabbalists took up
the doctrine of migration, the gilgul or ' rolling on ' of souls,
and maintained it by that characteristic method of Biblical
interpretation which it is good to hold up from time to time
for a warning to the mystical interpreters of our own day.
The soul of Adam passed into David, and shall pass into
the Messiah, for are not these initials in the very name of
Ad(a)m, and does not Ezekiel say that ' my servant David
shall be their prince for ever.' Cain's soul passed into
Jethro, and Abel's into Moses, and therefore it was that
Jethro gave Moses his daughter to wife. Souls migrate into
beasts and birds and vermin, for is not Jehovah ' the lord
of the spirits of all flesh ' ? and he who has done one sin
beyond his good works shall pass into a brute. He who
gives a Jew unclean meat to eat, his soul shall enter into a
leaf, blown to and fro by the wind ; ' for ye shall be as an
oak whose leaf fadeth ; ' and he who speaks ill words, his
soul shall pass into a dumb stone, as did Nabal's, ' and he
became a stone.' 1 Within the range of Christian influence
the Manichaeans appear as the most remarkable exponents
of the metempsychosis. We hear of their ideas of sinners'
souls transmigrating into beasts, the viler according to their
crimes ; that he who kills a fowl or rat will become a fowl or
rat himself ; that souls can pass into plants rooted in the
ground, which thus have not only life but sense ; that the
souls of reapers pass into beans and barley, to be cut down
in their turn, and thus the elect were careful to explain to
the bread when they ate it, that it was not they who reaped
the corn it was made of ; that the souls of the auditors, that
is, the spiritually low commonalty who lived a married life,
would pass into melons and cucumbers, to finish their puri-
fication by being eaten by the elect. But these details come
to us from the accounts of bitter theological adversaries, and
Pindar. Olymp. ii. antistr. 4; Ovid. Metam. xv. 160 ; Lucian. Somn. 17,
&c. Philostr. Vit. Apollon. Tyan. See also Meyer's Conversations-Lexicon,
art. ' Seelenwanderung.' For re-birth in old Scandinavia, see Helgakvidha,
iii., in ' Edda.'
1 Eisenmenger, part ii. p. 23, Ac.
TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS. 15
the question is, how much of them did the Manichaeans really
and soberly believe ? Allowing for exaggeration and con-
structive imputation, there is some reason to consider the
account at least founded on fact. The Manichaeans appear
to have recognized a wandering of imperfect souls, whether
or not their composite religion may with its Zarathustrian
and Christian elements have also absorbed in so Indian a
shape the doctrine of purification of souls by migration into
animals and plants. 1 In later times, the doctrine of
metempsychosis has been again and again noticed in a
district of South-Western Asia. William of Ruysbroek
speaks of the notion of souls passing from body to body as
general among the mediaeval Nestorians, even a somewhat
intelligent priest consulting him as to the souls of brutes,
whether they could find refuge elsewhere so as not to be
compelled to labour after death. Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela
records in the I2th century of the Druses of Mount Hermon :
' They say that the soul of a virtuous man is transferred to
the body of a new-born child, whereas that of the vicious
transmigrates into a dog, or some other animal.' Such ideas
indeed, seem not yet extinct in the modern Druse nation.
Among the Nassairi, also, transmigration is believed in as
a penance and purification : we hear of migration of
unbelievers into camels, asses, dogs, or sheep, of disobedient
Nassairi into Jews, Sunnis, or Christians, of the faithful
into new bodies of their own people, a few such changes of
' shirt ' (i.e. body), bringing them to enter paradise or
become stars. 2 An instance of the belief within the limits
of modern Christian Europe may be found among the Bul-
garians, whose superstition is that Turks who have never
eaten pork in life will become wild boars after death. A
1 Beausobre, 'Hist, de Maniche'e,' &c., vol. i. pp. 245-6, vol. ii. pp. 496-9;
G. Fliigel, ' Mani.' See Augustin. Contra Faust. ; De Hxres. ; De
Quantitatc Animx.
* Gul. de Kubruquis in ' Rec. des Voy. Soc. de Geographic de Paris,' vol.
iv. p. 356. Benjamin of Tudela, ed. and tr. by Asher, Hebrew 22, Eng.
p. 62. Niebuhr, ' Reisebeschr. nach Arabien,' &c., vol. ii. pp. 438-443 ;
Meiners, vol. ii. p. 796.
l6 ANIMISM.
party assembled to feast on a boar has been known to throw
it all away, for the meat jumped off the spit into the fire,
and a piece of cotton was found in the ears, which the wise
man decided to be a piece of the ci-devant Turk's turban. 1
Such cases, however, are exceptional. Metempsychosis
never became one of the great doctrines of Christendom,
though not unknown in mediaeval scholasticism, and
though maintained by an eccentric theologian here and
there into our own times. It would be strange were it not
so. It is in the very nature of the development of religion
that speculations of the earlier culture should dwindle to
survivals, yet be again and again revived. Doctrines
transmigrate, if souls do not ; and metempsychosis,
wandering along the course of ages, came at last to animate
the souls of Fourier and Soame Jenyns.*
Thus we have traced the theory of metempsychosis in
stage after stage of the world's civilization, scattered among
the native races of America and Africa, established in the
Asiatic nations, especially where elaborated by the Hindu
mind into its system of ethical philosophy, rising and falling
in classic and mediaeval Europe, and lingering at last in the
modern world as an intellectual crotchet, of little account
but to the ethnographer who notes it down as an item of
1 St. ClaSr and Brophy, ' Bulgaria,' p. 57. Compare the tenets of the
Russian sect of Dukhobortzi, in Haxthausen, ' Russian Empire,' vol. i.
p. 288, &c.
* Since the first publication of the above remark, M. Louis Figuier has
supplied a perfect modern instance by his book, entitled ' Le Lendemain
de la Mort,' translated into English as 'The Day after Death: Our Future
Life according to Science.' His attempt to revive the ancient belief, and
to connect it with the evolution-theory of modern naturalists, is carried
out with more than Buddhist elaborateness. Body is the habitat of soul,
which goes out when a man dies, as one forsakes a burning house. In the
course of development, a soul may migrate through bodies stage after
stage, zoophyte and oyster, grasshopper and eagle, crocodile and dog, till
it arrives at man, thence ascending to become one of the superhuman
beings or angels who dwell in the planetary ether, and thence to a still
higher state, the secret of whose nature M. Figuier does not endeavour to
penetrate, ' because our means of investigation fail at this point.' The
ultimate destiny of the more glorified being is the Sun ; the pure spirits
who form its mass of burning gases, pour out germs and life to start the
course of planetary existence. (Note to 2nd edition.)
TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS. 17
evidence for his continuity of culture. What, we may well
ask, was the original cause and motive of the doctrine of
transmigration ? Something may be said in answer, though
not at all enough for full explanation. The theory that
ancestral souls return, thus imparting their own likeness of
mind and body to their descendants and kindred, has been
already mentioned and commended as in itself a very reason-
able and philosophical hypothesis, accounting for the phe-
nomenon of family likeness going on from generation to
generation. But why should it have been imagined that
men's souls could inhabit the bodies of beasts and birds ?
As has been already pointed out, savages not unreason-
ably consider the lower animals to have souls like their own,
and this state of mind makes the idea of a man's soul trans-
migrating into a beast's body at least seem possible. But it
does not actually suggest the idea. The view stated in a
previous chapter as to the origin of the conception of soul
in general, may perhaps help us here. As it seems that the
first conception of souls may have been that of the souls of
men, this being afterwards extended by analogy to the souls
of animals, plants, &c., so it may seem that the original
idea of transmigration was the straightforward and reason-
able one of human souls being re-born in new human bodies,
where they are recognized by family likenesses in successive
generations.This notion may have been afterwards extended
to take in re-birth in bodies of animals, &c. There are some
well-marked savage ideas which will fit with such a course
of thought. The half-human features and actions and
characters of animals are watched witfc wondering sympathy
by the savage, as by the child. The beast is the very incar-
nation of familiar qualities of man ; and such names as lion,
bear, fox, owl, parrot, viper, worm, when we apply them as
epithets to men, condense into a word some leading feature
of a human life. Consistently with this, we see in looking
over details of savage transmigration that the creatures
often have an evident fitness to the character of the human
beings whose souls are to pass into them, so that the savage
iS ANIMISM.
philosopher's fancy of transferred souls offered something
like an explanation of the likeness between beast and man.
This comes more clearly into view among the more civilized
races who have worked out the idea of transmigration into
ethical schemes of retribution, where the appropriateness of
the creatures chosen is almost as manifest to the modern
critic as it could have been to the ancient believer. Per-
haps the most graphic restoration of the state of mind in
which the theological doctrine of metempsychosis was
worked out in long-past ages, may be found in the writings
of a modern theologian whose spiritualism often follows to
the extreme the intellectual tracks of the lower races. In
the spiritual world, says Emanuel Swedenborg, such persons
as have opened themselves for the admission of the devil
and acquired the nature of beasts, becoming foxes in cun-
ning, &c., appear also at a distance in the proper shape of
such beasts as they represent in disposition. 1 Lastly, one of
the most notable points about the theory of transmigration
is its close bearing upon a thought which lies Very deep in
the history of philosophy, the development-theory of
organic life in successive stages. An elevation from the
vegetable to the lower animal life, and thence onward
through the higher animals to man, to say nothing of
superhuman beings, does not here require even a succession
of distinct individuals, but is brought by the theory of
metempsychosis within the compass of the successive
vegetable and animal lives of a single being.
Here a few words may be said on a subject which cannot
be left out of sight, connecting as it does the two great
branches of the doctrine of future existence, but which it
is difficult to handle in definite terms, and much more to
trace historically by comparing the views of lower and
higher races. This is the doctrine of a bodily renewal or
1 Swedenborg, 'The True Christian Religion,' 13. Compare the notion
attributed to the followers of Basilides the Gnostic, of men whose souls are
affected by spirits or dispositions as of wolf, ape, lion, or bear, wherefore
their souls bear the properties of these, and imitate their deeds (Clem.
Alfx. Stromar. ii. c. 20).
RESURRECTION OF BODY. ig
resurrection. To the philosophy of the lower races it is
by no means necessary that the surviving soul should be
provided with a new body, for it seems itself to be of a
filmy or vaporous corporeal nature, capable of carrying on
an independent existence like other corporeal creatures.
Savage descriptions of the next world are often such ab-
solute copies of this, that it is scarcely possible to say
whether the dead are or are not thought of as having bodies
like the living ; and a few pieces of evidence of this class
are hardly enough to prove the lower races to hold original
and distinct doctrines of corporeal resurrection. 1 Again,
attention must be given to the practice, so common among
low and high races, of preserving relics of the dead, from
mere morsels of bone up to whole mummified bodies. It
is well known that the departed soul is often thought apt
to revisit the remains of the body, as is seen in the well-
known pictures of the Egyptian funeral ritual. But the
preservation of these remains, even where it thus involves
a permanent connexion between body and soul, does not
necessarily approach more closely to a bodily resurrection. 2
In discussing the closely allied doctrine of metempsy-
chosis, I have described the theory of the soul's trans-
migration into a new human body as asserting in fact an
earthly resurrection. From the same point of view, a
bodily resurrection in Heaven or Hades is technically a
transmigration of the soul. This is plain among the higher
races, in whose religion these doctrines take at once clearer
definition and more practical import. There are some dis-
tinct mentions of bodily resurrection in the Rig Veda : the
dead is spoken of as glorified, putting on his body (tanu) ;
and it is even promised that the pious man shall be born in
the next world with his entire body (sarvatanu). In Brah-
1 See J. G. Miiller, ' Amer. Urrel.' p. 208 (Caribs) ; but compare Rochefort,
p. 429. Steller, ' Kamtschatka,' p. 269 ; Castren, ' Finnische Mythologie,'
p. 119.
2 For Egyptian evidence see the funeral papyri and translations of
the ' Book of the Dead.' Compare Brinton, ' Myths of New World,' p. 254.
&c.
20 ANIMISM.
minism and Buddhism, the re-births of souls in bodies to
inhabit heavens and hells are simply included as particular
cases of transmigration. The doctrine of the resurrection
appears far back in the religion of Persia, and is thence sup-
posed to have passed into late Jewish belief. 1 In early Chris-
tianity, the conception of bodily resurrection is developed
with especial strength and fulness in the Pauline doctrine.
For an explicit interpretation of this doctrine, such as com-
mended itself to the minds of later theologians, it is instruc-
tive to cite the remarkable passage of Origen.where he speaks
of 'corporeal matter, of which matter, in whatever quality
placed, the soul always has use, now indeed carnal, but after-
wards indeed subtler and purer, which is called spiritual.' 1
Passing from these metaphysical doctrines of civilized
theology, we now take up a series of beliefs higher in prac-
tical moment, and more clearly conceived in savage thought.
There may well have been, and there may still be, low races
destitute of any belief in a Future State. Nevertheless,
prudent ethnographers must often doubt accounts of such,
for this reason, that the savage who declares that the dead
live no more, may merely mean to say that they are dead.
When the East African is asked what becomes of his buried
ancestors, the ' old people,' he can reply that ' they are
ended,' yet at the same time he fully admits that their
ghosts survive.' In an account of the religious ideas of the
Zulus, taken down from a native, it is explicitly stated that
Unkulunkulu the Old-Old-One said that people ' were to
die and never rise again,' and that he allowed them to ' die
and rise no more.' 4 Knowing so thoroughly as we now do
the theology of the Zulus, whose ghosts not only survive in
1 Aryan evidence in ' Rig- Veda,' x. 14, 8 ; xi. i, 8 ; Manu, xii. 16-22 ;
Max Muller, Todtenbestattung,' pp. xii. xiv. ; ' Chip*,' vol. i. p. 47 ; Muir
in 'Journ. At. Soc. Bengal,' vol. i. 1865, p. 306; Spiegel, 'Avetta'; Haug,
' Essays on the Parsis.'
1 Origen, De Princip. ii. 3, 2 : ' materise corporalis, cujus materiz anima
mum semper habet, in qualibet qualitate positse, mine quidem carnali,
postmodum vero subtiliori et puriori, quz spiritalii appellatur.'
* Burton, ' Central Africa,' vol. ii. p. 345.
* Callaway, ' Rel. of Amazulu,' p. 84.
FUTURE LIFE. 21
the under-world, but are the very deities of the living, we
can put the proper sense to these expressions. But without
such information, we might have mistaken them for denials
of the soul's existence after death. This objection may even
apply to one of the most formal denials of a future life ever
placed on record among an uncultured race, a poem of the
Dinka tribe of the White Nile, concerning Dendid the
, Creator :
' On the day when Dendid made all things,
He made the sun ;
And the sun comes forth, goes down, and comes again :
He made the moon ;
And the moon comes forth, goes down, and comes again :
He made the stars ;
And the stars come forth, go down, and come again :
He made man ;
And man comes forth, goes down into the ground, and comes no more.'
It is to be remarked, however, that the close neighbours
of these Dinka, the Bari, believe that the dead do return to
live again on earth, and the question arises whether it is the
doctrine of bodily resurrection, or the doctrine of the sur-
viving ghost-soul, that the Dinka poem denies. The mis-
sionary Kaufmann says that the Dinka do not believe the
immortality of the soul, that they think it but a breath,
and with death all is over ; Brun-Rollet's contrary
authority goes to prove that they do believe in another
life ; both leave it an open question whether they recog-
nize the existence of surviving ghosts. 1
Looking at the religion of the lower races as a whole, we
shall at least not be ill-advised in taking as one of its general
and principal elements the doctrine of the soul's Future
Life. But here it is needful to explain, to limit, and to
reserve, lest modern theological ideas should lead us to
misconstrue more primitive beliefs. In such enquiries the
1 Kaufmann, ' Schilderungen aus Centralafrika,' p. 124 ; G. Lejean in
' Rev. des Deux Mondes,' Apr. i, 1860, p. 760 ; see Brun-Rollet, 4 Nil Blanc,'
pp. 100, 234. A dialogue by the missionary Beltrame (1859-60), in
Mitterutzner, ' Dinka-Sprache,' p. 57, ascribes to the Dinkas ideas of heaven
and hell, which, however, show Christian influence.
22 ANIMISM.
phrase ' immortality of the soul ' is to be avoided as mis-
leading. It is doubtful how far the lower psychology enter-
tains at all an absolute conception of immortality, for past
and future fade soon into utter vagueness as the savage mine
quits the present to explore them, the measure of months
and years breaks down even within the narrow span of
human life, and the survivor's thought of the soul of the
departed dwindles and disappears with the personal memory,
that kept it alive. The doctrine of the surviving soul may
indeed be treated as common to all known races, though its
acceptance is not unanimous. In savage as in civilized life,
dull and careless natures ignore a world to come as too far
off, while sceptical intellects are apt to reject its belief as
wanting proof. There are even statements on record of
whole classes being formally excluded from future life.
This may be a matter of social pride. In the Tonga Islands,
according to Mariner, it was held that the chiefs and nobles
would live hereafter in the happy island of Bolotu, but that
the souls of the common people would die with their bodies.
So Captain John Smith relates as to the belief of the
Virginians, that the chiefs went after death beyond the
sunset mountains, there to dance and sing with their pre-
decessors, ' but the common people they suppose shall not
live after death. 1 In the record of a missionary examina-
tion of the Nicaraguans, they are made to state their belief
that if a man lived well, his soul would ascend to dwell
among the gods, but if ill it would perish with the body,
and there would be an end of it. 1 None of these accounts,
however, agree with what is known of the religion of
kindred peoples, Polynesian, Algonquin, or Aztec. But
granted that the soul survives the death of the body,
instance after instance from the records of the lower
culture shows this soul to be regarded as a mortal
being, liable like the body itself to accident and death.
The Greenlanders pitied the poor souls who must pass
in winter or in storm the dreadful mountain where
1 Mariner, ' Tonga Is.' vol. ii. p. 136 ; John Smith, ' Dcscr. of Virginia, 1
; ; ; Oviedo, 'Nicaragua,' p. 50. The reference to the Laos in Meincrs,
vol. ii. p. 760, is worthless.
SliCOND DEATH OF SOUL. 23
s
the dead descend to reach the other world, for then a
soul is like to come to harm, and die the other death where
there is nothing left, and this is to them the dolefullest thing
of all. 1 Thus the Fijians tell of the fight which the ghost
of a departed warrior must wage with the soul-killing Samu
and his brethren; this is the contest for which the dead man
is armed by burying the war-club with his corpse, and if he
conquers, the way is open for him to the judgment-seat of
Ndengei, but if he is wounded, his doom is to wander among
the mountains, and if killed in the encounter he is cooked
and eaten by Samu and his brethren. But the souls of un-
married Fijians will not even survive to stand this wager of
battle ; such try in vain to steal at low water round to the
edge of the reef past the rocks where Nangananga, destroyer
of wifeless souls, sits laughing at their hopeless efforts, and
asking them if they think the tide will never flow again, till
at last the rising flood drives the shivering ghosts to the
beach/and Nangananga dashes them in pieces on the great
black stone, as one shatters rotten firewood. 2 Such, again,
were the tales told by the Guinea negroes of the life or
death of departed souls. Either the great priest before
whom they must appear after death would j udge them , send-
ing the good in peace to a happy place, but killing the wicked
a second time with the club that stands ready before his
dwelling ; or else the departed shall be judged by their god
at the river of death, to be gently wafted by him to a pleasant
land if they have kept feasts and oaths and abstained from
forbidden meats, but if not, to be plunged into the river by
the god, and thus drowned and buried in eternal oblivion. 3
Even common water can drown a negro ghost, if we may
believe the missionary Cavazzi's story of the Matamba
widows being ducked in the river or pond to drown off the
1 Cranz, Gronland,' p. 259. y
" Williams, ' Fiji,' vol. i. p. 244. See ' Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. iii. p. 113
(Dayaks). Compare wasting and death of souls in depths of Hades, Taylor,
' New Zealand,' p. 232.
3 Bosman, 'Guinea' in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 401. See also Waitz,
' Anthropologie,' vol. ii. p. 191 (W. Afr.) ; Callaway, ' Rel. of Amazulu,'
P- 355-
24 ANIMISM.
souls of their departed husbands, who might still be hang
ing about them, clinging closest to the best-loved wives.
After this ceremony, they went and married again. 1 From
such details it appears that the conception of some souls
suffering extinction at death or dying a second death, a
thought still as heretofore familiar to speculative theology,
is not unknown in the lower culture.
The soul, as recognized in the philosophy of the lower
races, may be denned as an ethereal surviving being, con-
ceptions of which preceded and led up to the more tran-
scendental theory of the immaterial and immortal soul,
which forms part of the theology of higher nations. It is
principally the ethereal surviving soul of early culture that
has now to be studied in the religions of savages and bar-
barians and the folk-lore of the civilized world. That this
soul should be looked on as surviving beyond death is a
matter scarcely needing elaborate argument. Plain ex-
perience is there to teach it to every savage ; his friend or
his enemy is dead, yet still in dream or open vision he sees
the spectral form which is to his philosophy a real objective
being, carrying personality as it carries likeness. This
thought of the soul's continued existence is, however, but
the gateway into a complex region of belief. The doctrines
which, separate or compounded, make up the scheme of
future existence among particular tribes, are principally
these : the theories of lingering, wandering, and returning
ghosts, and of souls dwelling on or below or above the earth
in a spirit-world, where existence is modelled upon the
earthly life, or raised to higher glory, or placed under re-
versed conditions, and lastly, the belief in a division between
happiness and misery of departed souls, by a retribution for
deeds done in life, determined in a judgment after death.
' All argument is against it ; but all belief is for it,' said
Dr. Johnson of the apparition of departed spirits. The
doctrine that ghost-souls of the dead hover among the
1 Cavazzi, ' Congo, Matamba, ct Angola,' lib. i. p. z/o. See also Liebrecht
in ' Zeiuchr. fur Ethnologic," vol. v. p. 96 (Tartary, Scandinavia, Greece).
GHOSTS OF DEAD. 25
living is indeed rooted in the lowest levels of savage
culture, extends through barbaric life almost without a
break, and survives largely and deeply in the midst of civi-
lization. From the myriad details of travellers, mis-
sionaries, historians, theologians, spiritualists, it may be
laid down as an admitted opinion, as wide in distribution
as it is natural in thought, that the two chief hunting-
grounds of the departed soul are the scenes of its fleshly
life and the burial place of its body. As in North America
the Chickasaws believed that the spirits of the dead in
their bodily shape moved about among the living in great
joy ; as the Aleutian islanders fancied the souls of the
departed walking unseen among their kindred, and accom-
panying them in their j ourneys by sea and land ; as Africans
think that souls of the dead dwell in their midst, and eat
with them at meal times ; as Chinese pay their respects to
kindred spirits present in the hall of ancestors; 1 so multi-
tudes in Europe and America live in an atmosphere that
swarms with ghostly shapes spirits of the dead,who sit over
against the mystic by his midnight fire, rap and write in spirit-
circles, and peep over girls' shoulders as they scare them-
selves into hysterics with ghost-stories. Almost through-
out the vast range of animistic religion, we shall find the
souls of the departed hospitably entertained by the survivors
on set occasions, and manes-worship, so deep and strong
among the faiths of the world, recognizes with a reverence
not without fear and trembling those ancestral spirits
which, powerful for good or ill, manifest their presence
among mankind. Nevertheless death and life dwell but ill
together, and from savagery onward there is recorded many
a device by which the survivors have sought to rid them-
selves of household ghosts. Though the unhappy savage
custom of deserting houses after a decease may often be
connected with other causes, such as horror or abnegation
of all things belonging to the dead, there are cases where it
1 Schoolcraft, 'Indian Tribes,' part i. p. 310; Bastian, 'Psychologic.'
pp. in, 193; Doolittle, 'Chinese,' vol. i. p. 235.
26 ANIMISM.
appears that the place is simply abandoned to the ghost.
In Old Calabar it was customary for the son to leave his
fathers' house to decay, but after two years he might re-
build it, the ghost being thought by that time to have
departed; 1 the Hottentots abandoned the dead man's
house, and were said to avoid entering it lest the ghost
should be within ; * the Yakuts let the hut fall in ruins
where any one had expired, thinking it the habitation of
demons ;* the Karens were said to destroy their villages to
escape the dangerous neighbourhood of departed souls. 4
Such proceedings, however, scarcely extend beyond the
limits of barbarism, and only a feeble survival of the old
thought lingers on into civilization, where from time to time
a haunted house is left to fall in ruins, abandoned to a
ghostly tenant who cannot keep it in repair. But even in
the lowest culture we find flesh holding its own against
spirit, and at higher stages the householder rids himself
with little scruple of an unwelcome inmate. The Green-
landers would carry the dead out by the window, not by the
door, while an old woman, waving a firebrand behind, cried
' piklerrukpok ! ' i.e., ' there is nothing more to be had
here ! ' ; 8 the Hottentots removed the dead from the hut by
an opening broken out on purpose, to prevent him from
finding the way back ; the Siamese, with the same inten-
tion, break an opening through the house wall to carry the
coffin through, and then hurry it at full speed thrice round
the house ; 7 in Russia the Chuwashes fling a red-hot stone
1 Bastian, ' Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 323.
* Kolben, p. 579.
* Billings, p. 125.
4 Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien.' vol. i. p. 145; Cross, l.c., p. 311. For other
cases of desertion of dwellings after a death, possibly for the same motive, see
Bourien, ' Tribes of Malay Pen.' in Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iii. p. 82 ; Polack,
' M. of NewZealanders,' vol. i. pp. 204, 216 ; Steiler, ' Kamtschatka,' p. 271.
But the Todas say that the buffaloes slaughtered and the hut burnt at the
funeral are transferred to the spirit of the deceased in the next world ;
Shortt in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. vii. p. 247. See Waitz, vol. iii. p. 199.
8 Egede, 'Greenland,' p. 152; Cranz, p. 300.
e Bastian, ' Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 323 ; see pp. 329, 363.
7 Bowring, ' Siam,' vol. i. p. 122 ; Bastian, ' Oestl. Asien.' vol. iii. p. 258.
GHOSTS OF DEAD. 27
after the corpse is carried out, for an obstacle to bar the
soul from coming back ;* so Brandenburg peasants pour out
a pail of water at the door after the coffin, to prevent the
ghost from walking ; and Pomeranian mourners returning
from the churchyard leave behind the straw from the hearse
that the wandering soul may rest there, and not come back
so far as home. 1 In the ancient and mediaeval world, men
habitually invoked supernatural aid beyond such material
shifts as these, calling in the priest to lay or banish in-
truding ghosts, nor is this branch of the exorcist's art even
yet forgotten. There is, and always has been, a prevalent
feeling that disembodied souls, especially such as have
suffered a violent or untimely death, are baneful and mali-
cious beings. As Meiners suggests in his ' History of
Religions,' they were driven unwillingly from their bodies,
and have carried into their new existence an angry longing
for revenge . No wonder that mankind should so generally
agree that if the souls of the dead must linger in the world
at all, their fitting abode should be not the haunts of the
living but the resting-places of the dead.
After all, it scarcely seems to the lower animistic philo-
sophy that the connexion between body and soul is utterly
broken by death. Various wants may keep the soul from
its desired rest, and among the chief of these is when its
mortal remains have not had the funeral rites. Hence the
deep-lying belief that the ghosts of such will walk. Among
some Australian tribes the ' ingna,' or evil spirits, human
in shape, but with long tails and long upright ears, are
mostly souls of departed natives, whose bodies were left to
lie unburied or whose death the avenger of blood did not
expiate, and thus they have to prowl on the face of the
earth, and about the place of death, with no gratification
1 Castrln, ' Finn. Myth.' p. 120.
' Wuttke, ' Volksaberglaube,' pp. 213-17. Other cases of taking out the
dead by a gap made on purpose : Arbousset and Daumas, p. 502 (Bushmen) ;
Magyar, p. 351 (Kimbunda) ; Moffat, p. 307 (Bechuanas) ; Waitz, vol. iii.
p. 199 (Ojibwas) ; their motive is probably that the ghost may not find its
way back by the door.
28 ANIMISM.
but to harm the living. 1 In New Zealand, the ideas were
to be found that the souls of the dead were apt to linger
near the bodies, and that the spirits of men left unburied
or killed in battle and eaten, would wander ; and the bring-
ing such malignant souls to dwell within the sacred burial-
enclosure was a task for the priest to accomplish with his
charms. 1 Among the Iroquois of North America the spirit
also stays near the body for a time, and ' unless the rites
of burial were performed, it was believed that the spirits of
the dead hovered for a time upon the earth, in a state of
great unhappiness. Hence their extreme solicitude to pro-
cure the bodies of the slain in battle.' 3 Among Brazilian
tribes, the wandering shadows of the dead are said to be
considered unresting till burial. 4 In Turanian regions of
North Asia, the spirits of the dead who have no resting-
place in earth are thought of as lingering above ground,
especially where their dust remains. 6 South Asia has such
beliefs : the Karens say that the ghosts who wander on
earth are not the spirits of those who go to Plu, the land
of the dead, but of infants, of such as died by violence, of
the wicked, and of those who by accident have not been
buried or burned; 8 the Siamese fear as unkindly spirits the
souls of such as died a violent death or were not buried
with the proper rites, and who desiring expiation, invisibly
terrify their descendants. 7 Nowhere in the world had
such thoughts a stronger hold than in classic antiquity,
where it was the most sacred of duties to give the body
its funeral rites, that the shade should not flit moaning
near the gates of Hades, nor wander in the dismal crowd
1 Oldfield in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iii. pp. 228, 236, 245.
8 Taylor, ' New Zealand,' p. 221 ; Schirren, p. 91 ; see Turner, 4 Polynesia,'
P- *33-
8 Morgan, ' League of Iroquois,' p. 174.
J. G. Muller, p. 286.
6 Castrin, ' Finn. Myth.' p. 126. >
6 Cross in ' Journ. Amer. Or. Soc.' vol. iv. p. 309 ; Mason in ' Journ. As.
Soc. Bengal,' 1865, part ii. p. 203. See also J. Anderson, ' Erp. to W.
Yunnan,' pp. 126, 131 (Shans).
7 Bastian, 'Psychologic,' pp. 51, 99-101.
GHOSTS OP DEAD. 2Q
along the banks of Acheron. 1 An Australian or a Karen
would have taken in the full significance of the fatal
accusation against the Athenian commanders, that they
abandoned the bodies of their dead in the sea-fight of
Arginousai. The thought is not unknown to Slavonic
folk-lore : ' Ha ! with the shriek the spirit flutters from
the mouth, flies up to the tree, from tree to tree, hither
and thither till the dead is burned.'* In mediaeval
Europe the classic stories of ghosts that haunt the living
till laid by rites of burial pass here and there into new
legends, where, under a changed dispensation, the doleful
wanderer now asks Christian burial in consecrated earth. 3
It is needless to give here elaborate details of the world-
wide thought that when the corpse is buried, exposed,
burned, or otherwise disposed of after the accepted custom
of the land, the ghost accompanies its relics. The soul
stays near the Polynesian or the American Indian burial-
place ; it dwells among the twigs and listens joyfully to the
singing birds in the trees where Siberian tribes suspend
their dead ; it lingers by the Samoyed's scaffolded coffin ;
it haunts the Dayak's place of burial or burning ; it inhabits
the little soul-hut above the Malagasy grave, or the Peru-
vian house of sun-dried bricks ; it is deposited in the
Roman tomb (animamque sepulchro condimus) ; it comes
back for judgment into the body of the later Israelite and
the Moslem ; it inhabits, as a divine ancestral spirit, the
palace-tombs of the old classic and new Asiatic world ; it is
kept down by the huge cairn raised over Antar's body lest
his mighty spirit should burst forth, by the iron nails with
which the Cheremiss secures the corpse in its coffin, by the
stake that pins down the suicide's body at the four-cross
way. And through all the changes of religious thought
from first to last in the course of human history, the hover-
1 Lucian. De Luctu. See Pauly, ' Real. Encyclop.' and Smith, ' Die. of
Gr. and Rom. Ant.' s.v. ' inferi.'
1 Hanusch, ' Slaw. Myth.' p. 277.
8 Calmet, vol. ii. ch. xxxvi. ; Brand, vol. iii. p. 67.
30 ANIMISM.
ing ghosts of the dead make the midnight burial-ground a
place where men's flesh creeps with terror. Not to discuss
here the general subject of funeral rites of mankind, of
which only part of the multifarious details are directly re-
levant to the present purpose, a custom may be selected
which is admirably adapted for the study of animistic
religion, at once from the clear conception it gives of the
belief in disembodied souls present among the living, and
from the distinct line of ethnographic continuity in which
it may be traced onward from the lower to the higher
culture. This is the custom of Feasts of the Dead.
Among the funeral offerings described in the last chapter
of which the purpose more or less distinctly appears to be
that the departed soul shall take them away in some ghostly
or ideal manner, or that they shall by some means be con-
veyed to him in his distant spirit-home, there are given
supplies of food and drink. But the feasts of the dead with
which we are now concerned are given on a different prin-
ciple ; they are, so to speak, to be consumed on the prem-
ises. They are set out in some proper place, especially near
the tombs or in the dwelling-houses, and there the souls of
the dead come and satisfy themselves. In North America,
among Algonquins who held that one of a man's two souls
abides with the body after death, the provisions brought to
the grave were intended for the nourishment of this soul ;
tribes would make offerings to ancestors of part of any
dainty food, and an Indian who fell by accident into the
fire would believe that the spirits of his ancestors pushed
him in for neglecting to make due offerings. 1 The minds
of the Hurons were filled with fancies not less lifelike than
this. It seemed to them that the dead man's soul, in his
proper human figure, walked in front of the corpse as they
carried it to the burial-ground, there to dwell till the great
feast of the dead ; but meanwhile it would come and walk
by night in the village, and eat the remnants in the kettles,
1 Charlevoix, ' Nouvelle France,' vol. vi. p. 75 ; Schoolcraft, ' Indian
Tribes,' part i. pp. 39, 83 ; part iv. p. 65 ; Tanner's ' Narr.' p. 293.
FEASTS OF THE DEAD. 31
wherefore some would not eat of these, nor touch the food
at funeral feasts though some indeed would eat all. 1 In
Madagascar, the elegant little upper chamber in King
Radama's mausoleum was furnished with a table and two
chairs, and a bottle of wine, a bottle of water, and two
tumblers were placed there conformably with the ideas
entertained by most of the natives, that the ghost of the
departed monarch might occasionally visit the resting-place
of his body, meet with the spirit of his father, and partake
of what he was known to be fond of in his lifetime. 2 The
Wanika of East Africa set a coco-nut shell full of rice and
tembo near the grave for the ' koma ' or shade, which
cannot exist without food and drink. 3 In West Africa the
Efik cook food and leave it on the table in the little shed
or ' devil-house ' near the grave, and thither not only the
spirit of the deceased, but the spirits of the slaves sacrificed
at his funeral, come to partake of it.* Farther south, in the
'Congo district, the custom has been described of making a
channel into the tomb to the head or mouth of the corpse,
whereby to send down month by month the offerings of
food and drink. 5
Among rude Asiatic tribes, the Bodo of North-East India
thus celebrate the last funeral rites. The friends repair to
the grave, and the nearest of kin to the deceased, taking an
individual's usual portion of food and drink, solemnly pre-
sents it to the dead with these words, ' Take and eat, here-
tofore you have eaten and drunk with us, you can do so no
more ; you were one of us, you can be so no longer ; we
come no more to you, come you not to us.' Thereupon each
of the party breaks off a bracelet of thread put on his wrist
for this purpose, and casts it on the grave, a speaking sym-
bol of breaking the bond of fellowship, and ' next the party
Brebeuf in ' Rel. des Je"s.' 1636, p. 104.
Ellis, 'Madagascar,' vol. i. pp. 253,364. See Taylor, 'New Zealand,' p. 220.
Krapf, ' E. Afr.' p. 150.
T. J. Hutchinson, p. 206.
Cavazzi, ' Congo, &c.' lib. i. p. 264. So in ancient Greece, Lucian.
Charon, 22.
32 ANIMISM.
proceed to the riv&r and bathe, and having thus lustrated
themselves, they repair to the banquet and eat, drink, and
make merry as though they never were to die.' 1 With more
continuance of affection, Naga tribes of Assam celebrate
their funeral feasts month by month, laying food and drink
on the graves of the departed.* In the same region of the
world, the Kol tribes of Chota Nagpur are remarkable for
their pathetic reverence for their dead. When a Ho or Munda
has been burned on the funeral pile, collected morsels of his
bones are carried in procession with a solemn, ghostly, slid-
ing step, keeping time to the deep-sounding drum, and when
the old woman who carries the bones on her bamboo tray
lowers it from time to time, then girls who carry pitchers
and brass vessels mournfully reverse them to show that
they are empty ; thus the remains are taken to visit every
house in the village, and every dwelling of a friend or
relative for miles, and the inmates come out to mourn and
praise the goodness of the departed ; the bones are carried
to all the dead man's favourite haunts, to the fields he
cultivated, to the grove he planted, to the threshing-floor
where he worked, to the village dance-room where he made
merry. At last they are taken to the grave, and buried in
an earthen vase upon a store of food, covered with one of
those huge stone slabs which European visitors wonder
at in the districts of the aborigines in India. Besides these,
monumental stones are set up outside the village to the
memory of men of note ; they are fixed on an earthen
plinth, where the ghost, resting in its walks among the
living, is supposed to sit shaded by the pillar. The
Kheriahs have collections of these monuments in the little
enclosures round their houses, and offerings and libations
are constantly made at them. With what feelings such rites
are celebrated may be judged from this Ho dirge :
' We never scolded you ; never wronged you ;
Come to us back !
1 Hodgson, ' Abor. of India,' p. 180. * ' Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. ii. p. 235.
FEASTS OF THE DEAD. 33
We ever loved and cherished you ; and have lived long together
Under the same roof ;
Desert it not now !
The rainy nights, and the cold blowing days, are coming on ;
Do not wander here !
Do not stand by the burnt ashes ; come to us again !
You cannot find shelter under the peepul, when the rain conies down.
The saul will not shield you from the cold bitter wind.
Come to your home !
It is swept for you, and clean ; and we are there who loved you ever ;
And there is rice put for you ; and water ;
Come home, come home, come to us again ! '
Among the Kol tribes this kindly hospitality to ancestral
souls passes on into the belief and ceremony of full manes-
worship : votive offerings are made to the ' old folks ' when
their descendants go on a journey, and when there is sick-
ness in the family it is generally they who are first pro-
pitiated. 1 Among Turanian races, the Chuwash put food
and napkins on the grave, saying, ' Rise at night and eat
your fill, and there ye have napkins to wipe your mouths ! '
while the Cheremiss simply said, ' That is for you, ye dead,
there ye have food and drink ! ' In this Tatar region we
hear of offerings continued year after year, and even of
messengers sent back by a horde to carry offerings to the
tombs of their forefathers in the old land whence they had
emigrated.*
Details of this ancient rite are to be traced from the level
of these rude races far upward in civilization. South-East
Asia is full of it, and the Chinese may stand as its repre-
sentative. He keeps his cofhned parent for years, serving
him with meals as if alive. He 'summons ancestral souls
with prayer and beat of drum to feed on the meat and drink
set out on special days when they are thought to return
home. He even gives entertainments for the benefit of
1 Tickell in ' Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,' vol. ix. p. 795 ; Dalton, ibid. 1866,
part ii. p. 153, &c. ; and in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. vi. p. i, &c. ; Latham,
' Descr. Eth.' vol. ii. p. 415, &c.
1 Bastian, 'Psychologic,' p. 62; Castre'n, 'Finn. Myth.' p. 121.
34 ANIMISM.
destitute and unfortunate souls in the lower regions, such as
those of lepers and beggars. Lanterns are lighted to show
them the way, a feast is spread for them, and with charac-
teristic fancy, some victuals are left over for any blind or
feeble spirits who may be late, and a pail of gruel is provided
for headless souls, with spoons for them to put it down their
throats with. Such proceedings culminate in the so-called
Universal Rescue, now and then celebrated, when a little
house is built for the expected visitors, with separate ac-
commodation and bath-rooms for male and female ghosts. 1
The ancient Egyptian would set out his provision of cakes
and trussed ducks on reed scaffolds in the tomb, or would
even keep the mummy in the house to be present as a guest
at the feast, <rvvocnrvov KOI <rv\i.iran\v tiroirfra.ro, as Lucian
says.* The Hindu, as of old, offers to the dead the funeral
cakes, places before the door the earthen vessels of water for
him to bathe in, of milk for him to drink, and celebrates at
new and full moon the solemn presentation of rice-cakes
made with ghee, with its attendant ceremonies so import-
ant for the soul's release from its twelvemonth's sojourn
with Yama in Hades, and its transition to the Heaven of
the Pitaras, the Fathers. 8 In the classic world such rites
were represented by funeral feasts and oblations of food. 4
In Christian times there manifests itself that interesting
kind of survival which, keeping up the old ceremony in
form, has adapted its motive to new thoughts and feelings.
The classic funeral oblations became Christian, the silicer-
nium was succeeded by the feast held at the martyr's tomb.
Faustus inveighs against the Christians for carrying on the
ancient rites : ' Their sacrifices indeed ye have turned intc
love-feasts, their idols into martyrs whom with like vows ye
1 Doolittle, ' Chinese,' vol. i. p. 173, &c. ; vol. ii. p. 91, &c. ; Meiners,
vol. i. p. 306.
1 Wilkinson, ' Ancient Eg.' vol. ii. p. 362 ; Lucian. De Luctu, 21.
8 Manu, Hi. ; Colebrooke, ' Essays,' vol. i. p. 161, &c. ; Pictet, ' Originet
Indo-Europ.' part ii. p. 600 ; Ward, ' Hindoos,' vol. ii. p. 332.
4 Pauly, ' Real-Encyclop." s.v. ' funus ' ; Smith's ' Die.' s.v. ' funus.' See
Meiners, vol. i. pp. 305-19.
FEASTS OF THE DEAD. 35
worship ; ye appease the shades of the dead with wine and
meals, ye celebrate the Gentiles' solemn days with them,
such as calends and solstices, of their life certainly ye
have changed nought,' 1 and so forth. The story of Monica
shows how the custom of laying food on the tomb for the
manes passed into the ceremony, like to it in form, of set-
ting food and drink to be sanctified by the sepulchre of a
Christian saint. Saint-Foix, who wrote in the time of
Louis XIV., has left us an account of the ceremonial after
the death of a King of France, during the forty days before
the funeral when his wax effigy lay in state. They con-
tinued to serve him at meal-times as though still alive, the
officers laid the table, and brought the dishes, the maitre
d'hdtel handed the napkin to the highest lord present to be
presented to the king, a prelate blessed the table, the basins
of water were handed to the royal arm-chair, the cup was
served in its due course, and grace was said in the accus-
tomed manner, save that there was added to it the De Pro-
fundis.* Spaniards still offer bread and wine on the tombs
of those they love, on the anniversary of their decease. 8 The
conservative Eastern Church still holds to ancient rite. The
funeral feast is served in Russia, with its tables for the
beggars, laden with fish pasties and bowls of shchi and jugs
of kvas, its more delicate dinner for friends and priests, its
incense and chants of ' everlasting remembrance ' ; and even
the repetition of the festival on the ninth, and twentieth,
and fortieth day are not forgotten. The offerings of saucers
of kutiya or kolyvo are still made in the church ; this used
to be of parboiled wheat and was deposited over the body, it
is nowmade of boiled rice and raisins, sweetened with honey.
In their usual mystic fashion, the Orthodox Christians
now explain away into symbolism this remnant of primitive
offering to the dead : the honey is heavenly sweetness, the
1 Augustin. contra Faustum, xx. 4 ; De Civ. Dei, viii. 27 ; conf. vi. 2.
See Beausobre, vol. ii. pp. 633, 685 ; Bingham, xx. c. 7.
* Saint-Foix, ' Essais Historiques sur Paris/ in ' CEuvres,' vol. iv. p. 147,
&c.
8 Lady Herbert, * Impressions of Spain,' p. 8.
36 ANIMISM.
shrivelled raisins will be full beauteous grapes, the grain
typifies the resurrection, ' that which thou sowest is not
quickened except it die.' 1
In the calendar of many a people, differing widely as they
may in race and civilization, there are to be found special
yearly festivals of the dead. Their rites are much the same
as those performed on other days for individuals ; their
season differs in different districts, but seems to have par-
ticular associations with harvest-time and the fail of the
year, and with the year's end as reckoned at midwinter or
in early spring. 1 The Karens make their annual offerings
to the dead in the ' month of shades,' that is, December;"
the Kocch of North Bengal every year at harvest-home
offer fruits and a fowl to deceased parents ; 4 the Barea of
East Africa celebrate in November the feast of Thiyot, at
once a feast of general peace and merry-making, of thanks-
giving for the harvest, and of memorial for the deceased,
for each of whom a little pot-full of beer is set out two days,
to be drunk at last by the survivors ; 5 in West Africa we
Jiear of the feast of the dead at the time of yam-harvest; 6
at the end of the year the Haitian negroes take food to the
graves for the shades to eat, ' manger zombi,' as they say. 7
The Roman Feralia and Lemuralia were held in February
1 H. C. Romanoff, ' Rites and Customs of Greco-Russian Church/
p. 249 ; Ralston, ' Songs of the Russian People,' pp. 135, 320 ; St. Clair and
Brophy, ' Bulgaria,' p. 77 ; Brand, ' Pop. Ant.' vol. i. p. 115.
1 Beside the accounts of annual festivals of the dead cited here, see the fol-
lowing : Santos, ' Ethiopia,' in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 685 (Sept.) ; Brasseur,
' Mexique,' vol. iii. pp. 23, 522, 528 (Aug., Oct., Nov.) ; Rivero and Tschudi,
' Peru,' p. 134 (Peruvian feast dated as Nov. 2 in coincidence with All Souls',
but this reckoning is vitiated by confusion of seasons of N. and S. hemisphere,
see J. G. Miiller, p. 389 ; moreover, the Peruvian feast may have been origi-
nally held at a different date, and transferred, as happened elsewhere, to the
Spanish All Souls') ; Doolittle, ' Chinese,' vol. ii. pp. 44, 62 (esp. Apr.) ;
Caron, ' Japan,' in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 629 (Aug.).
* Mason, ' Karens,' 1. c. p. 238.
4 Hodgson, ' Abor. of India,' p. 147.
8 Munzinger, ' Ostafr. Stud.' p. 473.
' Waitz, vol. ii. p. 194.
7 G. D'Alaux in ' Rev. des Deux Mondes,' May 15, 1852, p. 76.
FEASTS OF THE DEAD. 37
and May. 1 In the last five or ten days of their year the
Zoroastrians hold their feasts for departed relatives, when
souls come back to the world to visit the living, and receive
from them offerings of food and clothing. 2 The custom of
setting empty seats at the St. John's Eve feast, for the
departed souls of kinsfolk, is said to have lasted on in
Europe to the seventeenth century. Spring is the season
of the time-honoured Slavonic rite of laying food on the
graves of the dead. The Bulgarians hold a feast in the
cemetery on Palm Sunday, and, after much eating and
drinking, leave the remains upon the graves of their friends,
who, they are persuaded, will eat them during the night.
In Russia such scenes may still be watched on the two
appointed days called Parents' Days. The higher classes
have let the rite sink to prayer at the graves of lost re-
latives, and giving alms to the beggars who flock to the
cemeteries. But the people still ' howl ' for the dead, and
set out on their graves a handkerchief for a tablecloth, with
gingerbread, eggs, curd-tarts, and even vodka, on it ; when
the weeping is over, they eat up the food, especially com-
memorating the dead in Russian manner by partaking of
his favourite dainty, and if he were fond of a glass, the
vodka is sipped with the ejaculation, ' The Kingdom of
Heaven be his ! He loved a drink, the deceased ! ' 3 When
Odilo, Abbot of Cluny, at the end of the tenth century, in-
stituted the celebration of All Souls' Day (November 2),'
1 Ovid. Fast. ii. 533 ; v. 420.
1 Spiegel, ' Avesta,' vol. ii. p. ci. ; Alger, p. 137.
8 Hanusch, ' Slaw. Myth.' pp. 374, 408 ; St. Clair and Brophy, ' Bulgaria,'
p. 77 ; Romanoff, ' Greco-Roman Church,' p. 255.
4 Petrus Damianus, ' Vita S. Odilonis,' in the Bollandist ' Acta Sanctorum,'
Jan. i, has the quaint legend attached to the new ordinance. An island
hermit dwelt near a volcano, where souls of the wicked were tormented in
the flames. The holy man heard the officiating demons lament that their
daily task of new torture was interfered with by the prayers and alms of
devout persons leagued against them to save souls, and especially they
complained of the Monks of Cluny. Thereupon the hermit sent a message
to Abbot Odilo, who carried out the work to the efficacy of which he had
received such perfect spiritual testimony, by decreeing that November 2, the
day after All Saints', should be set apart for services for the departed.
38 ANIMISM.
he 'set on foot one of those revivals which have so often
given the past a new lease of life. The Western Church at
large took up the practice, and round it there naturally
gathered surviving remnants of the primitive rite of ban-
quets to the dead. The accusation against the early Christ-
ians, that they appeased the shades of the dead with feasts
like the Gentiles, would not be beside the mark now, fifteen
hundred years later. On the eve of All Souls' begins,
within the limits of Christendom, a commemoration of the
dead which combines some touches of pathetic imagination
with relics of savage animism scarcely to be surpassed in
Africa or the South Sea Islands. In Italy the day is given
to feasting and drinking in honour of the dead, while skulls
and skeletons in sugar and paste form appropriate children's
toys. In Tyrol, the poor souls released from purgatory fire
for the night may come and smear their burns with the
melted fat of the ' soul light ' on the hearth, or cakes are
left for them on the table, and the room is kept warm for
their comfort. Even in Paris the souls of the departed
come to partake of the food of the living. In Brittany the
crowd pours into the churchyard at evening, to kneel bare-
headed at the graves of dead kinsfolk, to fill the hollow of
the tombstone with holy water, or to pour libations of milk
upon it. All night the church bells clang, and sometimes
a solemn procession of the clergy goes round to bless the
graves. In no household that night is the cloth removed,
for the supper must be left for the souls to come and take
their part, nor must the fire be put out, where they will
come to warm themselves. And at Jast, as the inmates
retire to rest, there is heard at the door a doleful chant it
is the souls, who, borrowing the voices of the parish poor,
have come to ask the prayers of the living. 1
If we ask how the spirits of the dead are in general sup-
1 Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 336. Meiners, vol. i. p. 316; vol. ii. p. 290.
Wuttke, ' Deutsche Volksaberglaube,' p. 216. Cortet, ' Files Religieuses,'
p. 233 ; ' Westminster Rev.' Jan. 1860 ; Hersart de la Villemarqui, ' Chants
de la Bretagne,' vol. ii. p. 307.
FEASTS OF THE DEAD. 39
posed to feed on the viands set before them, we come upon
difficult questions, which will be met with again in discuss-
ing the theory of sacrifice. Even where the thought is
certainly that the departed soul eats, this thought may be
very indefinite, with far less of practical intention in it than
of childish make-believe. Now and then, however, the
sacrificers themselves offer closer definitions of their mean-
ing. The idea of the ghost actually devouring the material
food is not unexampled. Thus, in North America, Algon-
quin Indians considered that the shadow-like souls of the
dead can still eat and drink, often even telling Father Le
Jeune that they had found in the morning meat gnawed in
the night by the souls. More recently, we read that some
Potawatomis will leave off providing the supply of food at
the grave if it lies long untouched, it being concluded that
the dead no longer wants it, but has found a rich hunting-
ground in the other world. 1 In Africa, again, Father
Cavazzi records of the Congo people furnishing their dead
with supplies of provisions, that they could not be persuaded
that souls did not consume material food. 8 In Europe the
Esths, offering food for the dead on All Souls', are said to
have rejoiced if they found in the morning that any of it
was gone. 8 A less gross conception is that the soul con-
1 Le Jeune in ' Rel. des JeV 1634, p. 16 ; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 195.
* Cavazzi, ' Congo,' &c., book i. 265.
8 Grimm, ' D. M.' p. 865, but not so in the account of the Feast of the
Dead in Boeder, ' Ehsten Abergl. Gebr.' (ed. Kreutzwald), p. 89. Compare
Martius, ' Ethnog. Amer.' vol. i. p. 345 (G6s). The following passage from a
spiritualist journal, ' The Medium,' Feb. 9, 1872, shows this primitive notion
curiously surviving in modern England. ' Every time we sat at dinner, we
had not only spirit-voices calling to us, but spirit-hands touching us ; and
last evening, as it was his farewell, they gave us a special manifestation, un-
asked for and unlocked for. He sitting at the right hand of me, a vacant
chair opposite to him began moving, and, in answer to whether it would have
some dinner, said " Yes." I then asked it to select what it would take, when
it chose croquets des pommes de terre (a French way of dressing potatoes, about
three inches long and two wide. I will send you one that you may see it).
I was desired to put this on the chair, either in a tablespoon or on a plate.
I placed it in a tablespoon, thinking that probably the plate might be broken.
In a few seconds I was told that it was eaten, and looking, found the half
of it gone, with the marks showing the teeth.' (Note to 2nd ed.)
40 ANIMISM.
sumes the steam or savour of the food, or its essence or
spirit. It is said to have been with such purpose that the
Maoris placed food by the dead man's side, and some also
with him in the grave. 1 The idea is well displayed among
the natives in Mexican districts, where the souls who came
to the annual feast are described as hovering over and
smelling the food set out for them, or sucking out its
nutritive quality. 2 The Hindu entreats the manes to quaff
the sweet essence of the offered food ; thinking on them, he
slowly sets the dish of rice before the Brahmans, and while
they silently eat the hot food, the ancestral spirits take
their part of the feast. 3 At the old Slavonic meals for the
dead, we read of the survivors sitting in silence and throw-
ing morsels under the table, fancying that they could hear
the spirits rustle, and see them feed on the smell and steam
of the viands. One account describes the mourners at the
funeral banquet inviting in the departed soul thought to be
standing outside the door, and every guest throwing morsels
and pouring drink under the table, for him to refresh him-
self. What lay on the ground was not picked up, but was
left for friendless and kinless souls. When the meal was
over, the priest rose from table, swept out the house, and
hunted out the souls of the dead ' like fleas,' with these
words, ' Ye have eaten and drunken, souls, now go, now
go ! '* Many travellers have described the imagination
with which the Chinese make such offerings. It is that the
spirits of the dead consume the impalpable essence of the
food, leaving behind its coarse material substance, where-
fore the dutiful sacrificers, having set out sumptuous feasts
for ancestral souls, allow them a proper time to satisfy their
appetite, and then fall to themselves. 5 The Jesuit Father
Christoforo Borri suggestively translates the native idea
into his own scholastic phraseology. In Cochin China,
1 Taylor, ' New Zealand,' p. 220, see 104.
1 Brasseur, ' Mexique,' vol. iii. p. 24.
8 Colebropke, ' Essays,' vol. i. p. 163, &c. ; Manu. iii.
4 Hanusch, ' Slaw. Myth.' p. 408 5 Hartknoch, ' Preussen,' part i. p. 187.
' Doolittle, ' Chinese,' vol. ii. pp. 33, 48 ; Meiners, vol. i. p. 318.
FEASTS OF THE DEAD. 4!
according to him, people believed ' that the souls of the
dead have need of corporeal sustenance and maintenance,
wherefore several times a year, according to their custom,
they make splendid and sumptuous banquets, children to
their deceased parents, husbands to their wives, friends to
their friends, waiting a long while for the dead guest to
come and sit down at table to eat.' The missionaries
argued against this proceeding, but were met by ridicule of
their ignorance, and the reply ' that there were two things
in the food, one the substance, and the other the accidents
of quantity, quality, smell, taste, and the like. The im-
material souls of the dead, taking for themselves the sub-
stance of the food, which being immaterial is food suited to
the incorporeal soul, left only in the dishes the accidents
which corporeal senses perceive ; for this the dead had no
need of corporeal instruments, as we have said.' There-
upon the Jesuit proceeds to remark, as to the prospect of
conversion of these people, ' it may be judged from the
distinction they make between the accidents and the sub-
stance of the food which they prepare for the dead/ that it
will not be very difficult to prove to them the mystery of
the Eucharist. 1 Now to peoples among whom prevails the
rite of feasts of the dead, whether they offer the food in
mere symbolic pretence, or whether they consider the souls
really to feed on it in this spiritual way (as well as in the
cases inextricably mixed up with these, where the offering
is spiritually conveyed away to the world of spirits), it can
be of little consequence what becomes of the gross material
food. When the Kafir sorcerer, in cases of sickness, de-
clares that the shades of ancestors demand a particular cow,
the beast is slaughtered and left shut up for a time for the
shades to eat, or for its spirit to go to the land of shades,
and then is taken out to be eaten by the sacrificers. 2 So,
in more civilized Japan, when the survivors have placed
1 Borri, ' Relatione della Nuova Missione della Comp. di Giesu,' Rome,
1631, p. zo8 ; and in Pinkerton, vol. ix. p. 822, &c.
1 Grout, 'Zulu Land,' p. 140 ; sec Callaway, ' Rel. of Amazulu,' p. u.
II. D,
42 ANIMISM.
their offering of unboiled rice and water in a hollow made
for the purpose in a stone of the tomb, it seems to them
no matter that the poor or the birds really carry off the
grain. 1
Such rites as these are especially exposed to dwindle in
survival. The offerings of meals and feasts to the dead
may be traced at their last stage into mere traditional
ceremonies, at most tokens of affectionate remembrance of
the dead, or works of charity to the living. The Roman
Feralia in Ovid's time were a striking example of such
transition, for while the idea was recognized that the ghosts
fed upon the offerings, ' nunc posito pascitur umbra cibo,'
yet there were but ' parva munera,' fruits and grains of
salt, and corn soaked in wine, set out for their meal in the
middle of the road. ' Little the manes ask, the pious
thought stands instead of the rich gift, for Styx holds no
greedy gods : '-
' Parva petunt manes. Pietas pro divite grata est
Munere. Non avidos Styx habet ima decs.
Tegula porrectis satis est velata coronis,
Et sparsae fruges, parcaque mica salis,
Inque mero mollita ceres, violaeque solutae :
Haec habeat media testa relicta via.
Nee majora veto. Sed et his placabilis umbra est.' *
Still farther back, in old Chinese history, Confucius had
been called on to give an opinion as to the sacrifices to the
dead. Maintainer of all ancient rites as he was, he strin-
gently kept up this, ' he sacrificed to the dead as if they were
present,' but when he was asked if the dead had knowledge
of what was done or no, he declined to answer the question;
for if he replied yes, then dutiful descendants would in-
jure their substance by sacrifices, and if no, then undutiful
children would leave their parents unburied. The evasion
was characteristic of the teacher who expressed his theory
of worship in this maxim, ' to give oneself earnestly to the
1 Caron, ' Japan,' vol. vii. p. 629 ; see Turpin, ' Siam,' ibid. vol. ix. p. 590.
Ovid/ Fast. ii. 533.
FEASTS OF THE DEAD. 43
duties due to men, and, while respecting spiritual beings,
to keep aloof from them, may be called wisdom.' It is said
that in our own time the Taepings have made a step beyond
Confucius ; they have forbidden the sacrifices to the spirits
of the dead, yet keep up the rite of visiting their tombs on
the customary day, for prayer and the renewal of vows. 1
How funeral offerings may pass into commemorative ban-
quets and feasts to the poor, has been shown already. If
we seek in England for vestiges of the old rite of funeral
sacrifice, we may find a lingering survival into modern
centuries, doles of bread and drink given to the poor at
funerals, and ' soul-mass cakes ' which peasant girls
perhaps to this day beg for at farmhouses with the
traditional formula,
' Soul, soul, for a soul cake,
Pray you, mistress, a soul cake.' 2
Were it not for our knowledge of the intermediate stages
through which these fragments of old custom have come
down, it would seem far-fetched indeed to trace their origin
back to the savage and barbaric times of the institution of
feasts of departed souls.
1 Legge, ' Confucius,' pp. 101-2, 130 ; Bunsen, ' God in History,' p. 271.
* Brand, ' Pop. Ant.' vol. i. p. 392, vol. ii. p. 289. |