Culture art. Primitive culture. CHAPTER XIII ANIMISM (continued)

Culture art. EDWARD B. TYLOR Primitive culture. Chapter I The science of culture
Tylor, Edward Burnett, Sir, 1832-1917

"Primitive culture : researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, language, art, and custom"

CHAPTER XIII.

ANIMISM (continued).

Journey of the Soul to the Land of the Dead Visits by the Living
to the Regions of Departed Souls Connexion of such legends
with myths of Sunset : the Land of the Dead thus imagined as
in the West Realization of current religious ideas, whether of
savage or civilized theology, in narratives of visits to the Regions
of Souls Localization of the Future Life Distant earthly region :
Earthly Paradise, Isles of the Blest Subterranean Hades or Sheol
Sun, Moon, Stars Heaven Historical course of belief as to such
localization Nature of Future Life Continuance-theory, appar- ?
ently original, belongs especially to the lower races Transitional
theories Retribution-theory,apparentlyderived,belongs especially
to the higher races Doctrine of Moral Retribution as developed
in the higher culture Survey of Doctrine of Future State, from
savage to civilized stages Its practical effect on the sentiment
and conduct of Mankind . . . . . -44

CHAPTER XIII.
ANIMISM (continued).

Journey of the Soul to the Land of the Dead Visits by the Living to the
Regions of Departed Souls Connexion of such legends with myths of
Sunset : the Land of the Dead thus imagined as in the West Realiza-
tion of current religious ideas, whether of savage or civilized theology,
in narratives of visits to the Regions of Souls Localization of the Future
Life Distant earthly region : Earthly Paradise, Isles of the Blest
Subterranean Hades or Sheol Sun, Moon, Stars Heaven Historical
course of belief as to such localization Nature of Future Life Con-
tinuance-theory, apparently original, belongs especially to the lower
races Transitional theories Retribution -theory, apparently derived,
belongs especially to the higher races Doctrine of Moral Retribution
as developed in the higher culture Survey of Doctrine of Future
State, from savage to civilized stages Its practical effect on the senti-
ment and conduct of Mankind.

THE departure of the dead man's soul from the world of
living men, its journey to the distant land of spirits, the life
it will lead in its new home, are topics on which the lower
races for the most part hold explicit doctrines. When
these fall under the inspection of a modern ethnographer,
he treats them as myths ; often to a high degree intelligible
and rational in their origin, consistent and regular in their
structure, but not the less myths. Few subjects have
aroused the savage poet's mind to such bold and vivid
imagery as the thought of the hereafter. Yet also a survey
of its details among mankind displays in the midst of
variety a regular recurrence of episode which brings the
ever-recurring question, how far is this correspondence due
to transmission of the same thought from tribe to tribe,
and how far to similar but independent development in
distant lands ?
From the savage state up into the midst of civilization,

REGIONS OF DEPARTED SOULS. 45

the comparison may be carried through. Low races and
high, in region after region, can point out the very spot
whence the flitting souls start to travel toward their new
home. At the extreme western cape of Vanua Levu, a calm
and solemn place of cliff and forest, the souls of the Fijian
dead embark for the judgement-seat of Ndengei, and thither
the living come in pilgrimage, thinking to see their ghosts
and gods. 1 The Baperi of South Africa will venture to
creep a little way into their cavern of Marimatl6, whence
men and animals came forth into the world, and whither
souls return at death.* In Mexico the cavern of Chalcha-
tongo led to the plains of paradise, and the Aztec name of
Mictlan, ' Land of the Dead,' now Mitla, keeps up the
remembrance of another subterranean temple which opened
the way to the sojourn of the blessed. 3 How naturally a
dreary place, fit rather for the dead than the living, suggests
the thought of an entrance to the land of the departed,
is seen in the fictitious travels known under the name of
Sir John Mandevill, where the description of the Vale Peri-
lous, adapted from the terrible valley which Friar Odoric
had seen full of corpses and heard resound with strange
noise of drums, has this appropriate ending : ' This vale es
full of deuilles and all way has bene ; and men saise in that
cuntree that thare es ane entree to hell.' 4 In more genuine
folklore, North German peasants still remember on the
banks of the swampy Dromling the place of access to the
land of departed souls. 6 To us Englishmen the shores of
lake Avernus, trodden daily by our tourists, are more
familiar than the Irish analogue of the place, Lough Derg,
with its cavern entrance of St. Patrick's Purgatory leading
down to the awful world below. The mass of mystic details

1 Williams, ' Fiji,' vol. i. p. 239 ; Seemann, ' Viti,' p. 398.

* Arbousset and Daumas, p. 347 ; Casalis, p. 247.

* Brasseur, ' Mexique,' vol. Hi. p. 20, &c.

4 See 'The Buke of John Mandeuill,' 31, edited by Geo. F. Warner,
published by the Roxburghe Club, 1889 ; Yule, ' Cathay,' Hakluyt Soc.
[Note to 3rd ed.]

6 Wuttke, ' Volksaberglaube,' p. 215. Other cases in Bastian, ' Mensch,'
vol. ii. pp. 58, 369, &c.

46 ANIMISM.

need not be repeated here of the soul's dread journey by
caverns and rocky paths and weary plains, over steep and
slippery mountains, by frail bark or giddy bridge across
gulfs or rushing rivers, abiding the fierce onset of the soul-
destroyer or the doom of the stern guardian of the other
world. But before describing the spirit-world which is the
end of the soul's journey, let us see what the proof is which
sustains the belief in both. The lower races claim to hold
their doctrines of the future life on strong tradition, direct
revelation, and even personal experience. To them the
land of souls is a discovered country, from whose bourne
many a traveller returns.

Among the legendary visits to the world beyond the
grave, there are some that seem pure myth, without a touch
of real personal history. Ojibwa, the eponymic hero of his
North American tribe, as one of his many exploits descended
to the subterranean world of departed spirits, and came up
again to earth. 1 When the Kamchadals were asked how
they knew so well what happens to men after death, they
could answer with their legend of Haetsh the first man.
He died and went down into the world below, and a long
while after came up again to his former dwelling, and there,
standing above by the smoke-hole, he talked down to his
kindred in the house and told them about the life to come ;
it was then that his two daughters whom he had left below
followed him in anger and smote him so that he died a
second time, and now he is chief in the lower world, and
receives the Italmen when they die and rise anew.* Thus,
again, in the great Finnish epic, the Kalewala, one great
episode is Wainamoinen's visit to the land of the dead.
Seeking the last charm-words to build his boat, the hero
travelled with quick steps week after week through bush
and wood till he came to the Tuonela river, and saw before
him the island of Tuoni the god of death. Loudly he called
to Tuoni's daughter to bring the ferry-boat across :

1 Schoolcraft, ' Algic Res.' vol. ii. pp. 32, 64, and see ante, vol. i. p. 312.
* Steller, ' Kamtschatka,' p. 271 ; Klemm, ' C. G.' vol. ii. p. 312.

VISITS TO REGION OF SOULS. 47

' She, the virgin of Manala,
She, the washer of the clothing,
She, the wringer of the linen,
By the river of Tuonela,
In the under-world Manala,
Spake in words, and this their meaning,
This their answer to the hearer :
" Forth the boat shall come from hither,
When the reason thou hast given
That hath brought thee to Manala,
Neither slain by any sickness,
Nor by Death dragged from the living,
Nor destroyed by other ending." '

Wainamoinen replies with lying reasons. Iron brought him,
he says, but Tuoni's daughter answers that no blood drips
from his garment ; Fire brought him, he says, but she
answers that his locks are unsinged, and at last he tells his
real mission. Then she ferries him over, and Tuonetar the
hostess brings him beer in the two-eared jug, but Waina-
moinen can see the frogs and worms within and will not
drink, for it was not to drain Manala's beer- jug he had
come. He lay in the bed of Tuoni, and meanwhile they
spread the hundred nets of iron and copper across the river
that he might not escape ; but he turned into a reed in the
swamp, and as a snake crept through the meshes :

1 Tuoni's son with hooked fingers
Iron-pointed hooked fingers
Went to draw his nets at morning
Salmon-trout he found a hundred,
Thousands of the little fishes,
But he found no Wainamoinen,
Not the old friend of the billows.
Then the ancient Wainamoinen,
Come from out of Tuoni's kingdom,
Spake in words, and this their meaning,
This their answer to the hearer :
" Never mayst thou, God of goodness,
Never suffer such another
Who of self-will goes to Mana,
Thrusts his way to Tuoni's kingdom.

48 ANIMISM.

Many they who travel thither,

Few who thence have found the home-way,

From the houses of Tuoni

From the dwellings of Manala." ' l

It is enough to name the familiar classic analogues of these
mythic visits to Hades, the descent of Dionysos to bring
back Semele, of Orpheus to bring back his beloved Eury-
dike, of Herakles to fetch up the three-headed Kerberos at
the command of his master Eurystheus ; above all, the
voyage of Odysseus to the ends of the deep-flowing Ocean,
to the clouded city of Kimmerian men, where shining Helios
looks not down with his rays, and deadly night stretches
always over wretched mortals, thence they passed along
the banks to the entrance of the land where the shades of
the departed, quickened for a while by the taste of sacri-
ficial blood, talked with the hero and showed him the
regions of their dismal home. 2

The scene of the descent into Hades is in very deed
enacted day by day before our eyes, as it was before the eyes
of the ancient myth-maker,who watched the sun descend to
the dark under- world, and return at dawn to the "land of
living men. These heroic legends lie in close-knit con-
nexion with episodes of solar myth. It is by the simplest
poetic adaptation of the Sun's daily life, typifying Man's
life in dawning beauty, in mid-day glory, in evening death,
that mythic fancy even fixed the belief in the religions of
the world, that the Land of Departed Souls lies in the Far
West or the World Below. How deeply the myth of the
Sunset has entered into the doctrine of men concerning a
Future State, how the West and the Under- World have
become by mere imaginative analogy Regions of the Dead,
how the quaint day-dreams of savage poets may pass into

1 Kalewala, Rune xvi. ; see Schiefner's German Translation, and Castren,
' Finn. Myth.' pp. 128, 134. A Slavonic myth in Hanusch, p. 412.

2 Homer. Odyss. xi. On the vivification of ghosts by sacrifice of blood,
and on libations of milk and blood, see Meiners, vol. i. p. 315, vol. ii. p. 89 ;
J. G Miiller, p. 85 ; Rochholz, ' Deutscher Glaube und Brauch,' vol. i. p. i,
&c.

VISITS TO REGION OF SOULS. 49

honoured dogmas of classic sages and modern divines, all
this the crowd of details here cited from the wide range of
culture stand to prove.

Moreover, visits from or to the dead are matters of per-
sonal experience and personal testimony. When in dream
or vision the seer beholds the spirits of the departed, they
give him tidings from the other world, or he may even rise
and travel thither himself, and return to tell the living what
he has seen among the dead. It is sometimes as if the
traveller's material body went to visit a distant land, and
sometimes all we are told is that the man's self went, but
whether in body or in spirit is a mere detail of which the
story keeps no record. Mostly, however, it is the seer's
soul which goes forth, leaving his body behind in ecstasy,
sleep, coma, or death. Some of these stories, as we trace
them on from savage into civilized times, are no doubt given
in good faith by the visionary himself, while others are
imitations of these genuine accounts. 1 Now such visions
are naturally apt to reproduce the thoughts with which the
seer's mind was already furnished. Every idea once lodged
in the mind of a savage, a barbarian, or an enthusiast, is
ready thus to be brought back to him from without. It is
a vicious circle ; what he believes he therefore sees, and
what he sees he therefore believes. Beholding the reflexion
of his own mind like a child looking at itself in a glass, he
humbly receives the teaching of his second self. The Red
Indian visits his happy hunting-grounds, the Tongan his
shadowy island of Bolotu, the Greek enters Hades and looks
on the Elysian Fields, the Christian beholds the heights of
Heaven and the depths of Hell.

Among the North American Indians, and especially the
Algonquin tribes, accounts are not unusual of men whose
spirits, travelling in dreams or in the hallucinations of
extreme illness to the land of the dead, have returned to
reanimate their bodies, and tell what they have seen.

1 See for example, various details in Bastian, ' Mensch,' vol. ii. pp.
369-75, &c.

5O ANIMISM.

Their experiences have been in great measure what they
were taught in early childhood to expect, the journey along
the path of the dead, the monstrous strawberry at which
the jebi-ug or ghosts refresh themselves, but which turns
to red rock at the touch of their spoons, the bark offered
them for dried meat and great puff-balls for squashes, the
river of the dead with its snake-bridge or swinging log, the
great dog standing on the other side, the villages of the
dead beyond. 1 The Zulus of our own day tell of men who
have gone down by holes in the ground into the under-
world, where mountains and rivers and all things are as
here above, and where a man may find his kindred, for the
dead live in their villages, and may be seen milking their
cattle, which are the cattle killed on earth and come to life
anew. The Zulu Umpengula, who told one of these stories
to Dr. Callaway, remembered when he was a boy seeing an
ugly little hairy man called Uncama, who once, chasing a
porcupine that ate his mealies, followed it down a hole in
the ground into the land of the dead. When he came back
to his home on earth he found that he had been given up
for dead himself, his wife had duly burnt and buried his
mats and blankets and vessels, and the wondering people at
sight of him again shouted the funeral dirge. Of this Zulu
Dante it used to be continually said, ' There is the man
who went to the underground people.'* One of the most
characteristic of these savage narratives is from New Zea-
land. This story, which has an especial interest from the
reminiscence it contains of the gigantic extinct Moa, and
which may be repeated at some length as an illustration of
the minute detail and lifelike reality which such visionary
legends assume in barbaric life, was told to Mr. Shortland
by a servant of his named Te Wharewera. An aunt of this

1 See vol. i. p. 481 ; also below, p. 52, note. Tanner's ' Narr.' p. 290 ;
Schoolcraft, 'Indian Tribes," part iii. p. 233; Keating, vol. ii. p. 154;
Loskiel, part i. p. 35 ; Smith, ' Virginia,' in Pinkerton, vol. xiii. p. 14. See
Cranz, ' Gronland,' p. 269.

* Callaway, 'Zulu Tales,' vol. i. pp. 316-20.

VISITS TO REGION OF SOULS. 51

man died in a solitary hut near the banks of Lake Rotorua.
Being a lady of rank she was left in her hut, the door and
windows were made fast, and the dwelling was abandoned,
as her death had made it tapu. But a day or two after, Te
Wharewera with some others paddling in a canoe near the
place at early morning saw a figure on the shore beckoning
to them. It was the aunt come to life again, but weak and
cold and famished. When sufficiently restored by their
timely help, she told her story. Leaving her body, her
spirit had taken flight toward the North Cape, and arrived
at the entrance of Reigna. There, holding on by the stem
of the creeping akeake-plant, she descended the precipice,
and found herself on the sandy beach of a river. Looking
round, she espied in the distance an enormous bird, taller
than a man, coming towards her with rapid strides. This
terrible object so frightened her, that her first thought was
to try to return up the steep cliff; but seeing an old man
paddling a small canoe towards her she ran to meet him,
and so escaped the bird. When she had been safely ferried
across she asked the old Charon, mentioning the name of
her family, where the spirits of her kindred dwelt. Follow-
ing the path the old man pointed out, she was surprised to
find it just such a path as she had been used to on earth ;
the aspect of the country, the trees, shrubs, and plants were
all familiar to her. She reached the village and among the
crowd assembled there she found her father and many near
relations ; they saluted her, and welcomed her with the
wailing chant which Maoris always address to people met
after long absence. But when her father had asked about
his living relatives, and especially about her own child, he
told her she must go back to earth, for no one was left to
take care of his grandchild. By his orders she refused to
touch the food that the dead people offered her, and in
spite of their efforts to detain her, her father got her safely
into the canoe, crossed with her, and parting gave her from
under his cloak two enormous sweet potatoes to plant at
home for his grandchild's especial eating. But as she began

52 ANIMISM.

to climb the precipice again, two pursuing infant spirits
pulled her back, and she only escaped by flinging the roots
at them, which they stopped to eat, while she scaled the
rock by help of the akeake-stem, till she reached the earth
and flew back to where she had left her body. On return-
ing to life she found herself in darkness, and what had
passed seemed as a dream, till she perceived that she was
deserted and the door fast, and concluded that she had
really died and come to life again. When morning dawned,
a faint light entered by the crevices of the shut-up house,
and she saw on the floor near her a calabash partly full of
red ochre mixed with water ; this she eagerly drained to
the dregs, and then feeling a little stronger, succeeded in
opening the door and crawling down to the beach, where
her friends soon after found her. Those who listened to
her tale firmly believed the reality of her adventures, but it
was much regretted that she had not brought back at least
one of the huge sweet-potatoes, as evidence of her visit to
the land of spirits. 1 Races of North Asia 1 and West Africa*
have in like manner their explorers of the world beyond
the grave.

Classic literature continues the series. Lucian's graphic

1 Shortland, 'Traditions of New Zealand,' p. 150; R. Taylor, 'New
Zealand,' p. 423. The idea, of which the classic representative belongs to
the myth of Persephone, that the living who tastes the food of the dead
may not return, and which is so clearly stated in this Maori story, appears
again among the Sioux of North America. Ahak-tah (' Male Elk ') seems
to die, but after two days comes down from the funeral-scaffold where hi
body had been laid, and tells his tale. His soul had travelled by the path of
braves through the beautiful land of great trees and gay loud-singing birds,
till he reached the river, and saw the homes of the spirits of his forefathers
on the shore beyond. Swimming across, he entered the nearest house, where
he found his uncle sitting in a corner. Very hungry, he noticed some wild
rice in a bark dish. ' I asked my uncle for some rice to eat, but he did not
give it to me. Had I eaten of the food for spirits, I never should have
returned to earth.' Eastman, ' Dacotah,' p. 177.

1 Castrin, ' Finn. Myth.' p. 139, &c.

* Bosman,' ' Guinea,' Letter 19, in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 501 ; Burton,
' Dahome,' vol. ii. p. 158. For modern visits to hell and heaven by Chris-
tianized negro visionaries in America, see Macrae, ' Americans at Home,'
vol. ii. p. 91.

VISITS TO REGION OF SOULS. 53

tales represent the belief of their age, if not of their author.
His Eukrates looks down the chasm into Hades, and sees
the dead reclining on the asphodel in companies of kinsfolk
and friends ; among them he recognizes Sokrates with his
bald head and pot-belly, and also his own father, dressed in
the clothes he was buried in. Then Kleodemos caps this
story with his own, how when he was sick, on the seventh
day when his fever was burning like a furnace, every one
left him, and the doors were shut. Then there stood before
him an all-beauteous youth in a white garment, .who led him
through a chasm into Hades, as he knew by seeing Tantalos
and Tityos and Sisyphos ; and bringing him to the court of
judgement, where were Aiakos and the Fates and the
Erinyes, the youth set him before Pluto the King, who sat
reading the names of those whose day of life was over.
But Pluto was angry, and said to the guide, ' This one's
thread is not run out, that he should depart, but bring me
Demylos the coppersmith, for he is living beyond the
spindle.' So Kleodemos came back to himself free from
his fever and announced that Demylos, who was a sick
neighbour, would die ; and accordingly a little while after
there was heard the cry of the mourners wailing for him. 1
Plutarch's stories, told more seriously, are yet one in type
with the mocking Lucian's. The wicked, pleasure-seeking
Thespesios lies three days as dead, and revives to tell his
vision of the world below. One Antyllos was sick, and
seemed to the doctors to retain no trace of life ; till, waking
without sign of insanity, he declared that he had been
indeed dead, but was ordered back to life, those who brought
him being severely chidden by their lord, and sent to fetch
Nikander instead, a well-known currier, who was accord-
ingly taken with a fever, and died on the third day. 1 Such
stories, old and new, are current among the Hindus at this
day. A certain man's soul, for instance, is ca/ried to the

1 Lucian. Philopseudes, c. 17-28.

2 Plutarch. De Sera Numinis Vindicta, xxii. ; and in Euseb. Praep. Evang.
xi. 36.

54 ANIMISM.

realm of Yama by mistake for a namesake, and is sei
back in haste to regain his body before it is burnt ; but in
the meanwhile he has a glimpse of the hideous punishments ^
of the wicked, and of the glorious life of those who had i
mortified the flesh on earth, and of suttee-widows now I
sitting in happiness by their husbands. 1 Mutatis mutandis :
these tales reappear in Christian mythology, as when i
Gregory the Great records that a certain nobleman named \
Stephen died, who was taken to the region of Hades, and j
saw many things he had heard before but not believed ; but ]
when he was set before the ruler there presiding, he sent j
him back, saying that it was this Stephen's neighbour |
Stephen the smith whom he had commanded to be I
brought ; and accordingly the one returned to life, and the j
other died. 8

The thought of human visitors revealing the mysteries of I
the world beyond the grave, which indeed took no slight j
hold on Christian belief, attached itself in a remark- I
able way to the doctrine of Christ's descent into Hades. J
This dogma had so strongly established itself by the end of
the 4th century, that Augustine could ask, ' Quis nisi in- I
fidelis negaverit fuisse apud inferos Christum ? '* A dis-
tinct statement of the dogma was afterwards introduced i
into the symbol commonly called the ' Apostles' Creed : '
1 Descendit ad inferos,' ' Descendit ad inferna,' He de- I
scended into hell.' 4 The Descent into Hades, which had
the theological use of providing a theory of salvation i
applicable to the saints of the old covenant, imprisoned in :
the limbo of the fathers, is narrated in full in the apocryphal
Gospel of Nicodemus, and is made there to rest upon a
legend which belongs to the present group of human visits 1
to the other world. It is related that two sons of Simeon, i

1 Ward, ' Hindoos,' vol. ii. p. 63.

Gregor. Dial. iv. 36. See Calmet, vol. ii. ch. 49.

' Augustin. Epist. clxiv. 2.

4 See Pearson, ' Exposition of the Creed ; ' Bingham, ' Ant. Ch. Ch.'
book x. ch. Hi. Art. iii. of the Church of England was reduced to its present
state by Archbp. Parker's revision.

VISITS TO REGION OF SOULS. 55

named Charinus and Leucius, rose from their tombs at the
Resurrection, and went about silently and prayerfully
among men, till Annas and Caiaphas brought them into the
synagogue, and charged them to tell of their raising from
the dead. Then, making the sign of the cross upon their
tongues, the two asked for parchment and wrote their record.
They had been set with all their fathers in the depths of
Hades, when on a sudden there appeared the colour of the
sun like gold, and a purple royal light shining on them ;
then the patriarchs and prophets, from Adam to Simeon
and John the Baptist, rejoicing proclaimed the coming of the
light and the fulfilment of the prophecies ; Satan and Hades
wrangled in strife together ; in vain the brazen gates were
shut with their iron bars, for the summons came to open
the gates that the king of glory may come in, who hath
broken the gates of brass and cut the bars of iron in sunder ;
then the mighty Lord broke the fetters and visited them who
sat in darkness and the shadow of death ; Adam and his
righteous children were delivered from Hades, and led into
the glorious grace of Paradise. 1

Dante, elaborating in the ' Divina Commedia ' the con-
ceptions of paradise, purgatory, and hell familiar to the
actual belief of his age, describes them once more in the
guise of a living visitor to the land of the dead. Echoes
in mediaeval legend of such exploring expeditions to the
world below still linger faintly in the popular belief of
Europe. It has been thus with St. Patrick's Purgatory, 1
the cavern in the island of Lough Derg, in the county
Donegal, which even in the seventeenth century O'Sullevan
could describe first and foremost in his ' Catholic His-
tory ' as ' the greatest of all memorable things of Ireland.'
Mediaeval visits to the other world were often made in the

1 Codex Apocr. N. T. Evang. Nicod. ed. Giles. ' Apocryphal Gospels,' &c.
tr. by A. Walker ; ' Gospel of Nicodemus.' The Greek and Latin texts differ
much.

1 The following details mostly from T. Wright, ' St. Patrick's Purgatory '
(an elaborate critical dissertation on the mediaeval legends of visits to the
pther world).

56 ANIMISM.

spirit. But like Ulysses, Wainamoinen, and Dante, men
could here make the journey in body, as did Sir Owain
and the monk Gilbert. When the pilgrim had spent fifteen
days in prayer and fasting in the church, and had been led
with litanies and sprinkling of holy water to the entrance
of the purgatory, and the last warnings of the monks
had failed to turn him from his venture, the door was
closed upon him, and if found next morning, he could
tell the events of his awful journey how he crossed the
narrow bridge that spans the river of death, how he
saw the hideous torments of hell, and approached the
joys of paradise. Sir Owain, one of King Stephen's
knights, went thither in penance for his life of violence
and rapine, and this was one of the scenes he beheld in
purgatory :

4 There come develes other mony mo,
And badde the knygth with hem to go,
And ladde him into a fowle contreye,
Where ever was nygth and never day,
For hit was derke and wonther colde :
Yette was there never man so bplde,
Hadde he never so mony clothes on,
But he wolde be colde as ony stone.
Wynde herde he none blowe,
But faste hit frese bothe hye and lowe.
They browgte him to a felde full brode,
Overe suche another never he yode,
For of the lengthe none ende he knewe
Thereover algate he moste nowe.
As he wente he herde a crye,
He wondered what hit was, and why,
He syg ther men and wymmen also
That lowde cryed, for hem was woo.
They leyen thykke on every londe,
Faste nayled bothe fote and honde
With nayles glowyng alle of brasse :
They etc the erthe so wo hem was ;
Here face was nayled to the grown de.
" Spare," they cryde, " a lytylle stounde."
The develes wolde hem not spare :
To hem peyne they thowgte yare.'

VISITS TO REGION OF SOULS. 57

When Owain had seen the other fields of punishment, with
their fiery serpents and toads, and the fires where sinners
were hung up by their offending members, and roasted on
spits, and basted with molten metal, and turned about on a
great wheel of fire, and when he had passed the Devil's
Mouth over the awful bridge, he reached the fair white glassy
wall of the Earthly Paradise, reaching upward and upward,
and saw before him the beautiful gate, whence issued a
ravishing perfume. Then he soon forgot his pains and
sorrows.

' As he stode, and was so fayne,
Hym thowgth ther come hym agayne
A swyde fayr processyoun
Of alle manere menne of relygyoun,
Fayre vestementes they hadde on,
So ryche syg he never none.
Myche joye hym thowgte to se
Bysshopes yn here dygnite" ;
Ilkone wente other be and be,
Every man yn his degr6.
He syg ther monkes and chanones,
And freres with newe shavene crownes ;
Ermytes he saw there amonge,
And nonnes with fulle mery songe ;
Persones, prestes, and vycaryes ;
They made fulle mery melodyes.
He syg ther kynges and emperoures,
And dukes that had casteles and toures,
Erles and barones fele,
That some tyme hadde the worldes wele.
Other folke he syg also,
Never so mony as he dede thoo.
Wymmen he syg ther that tyde :
Myche was the joye ther on every syde :
For alle was joye that with hem ferde,
And myche solempnyte' he herde.'

The procession welcomed Owain, and led him about, show-
ing him the beauties of that country :

4 Hyt was grene, and fulle of flowres
Of mony dy vers colowres ;

58 ANIMISM.

Hyt was grene on every syde,

As medewus are yn someres tyde.

Ther were trees growyng fulle grene

Fulle of fruyte ever more, y wene ;

For ther was frwyte of mony a kynde,

Such yn the londe may no mon fynde.

Ther they have the tree of lyfe,

Theryn ys myrthe, and never stryfe ;

Frwyte of wysdom also ther ys,

Of the whyche Adam and Eve dede amysse :

Other manere frwytes ther were fele,

And alle manere joye and wele.

Moche folke he syg ther dwelle,

There was no tongue that mygth hem telle ;

Alle were they cloded yn ryche wede,

What cloth hit was he kowthe not rede.

There was no wronge, but ever rygth,
Ever day and nevere nygth.
They shone as brygth and more clere
Than ony gonne yn the day doth here.'

The poem, in fifteenth-century English, from which these
passages are taken, is a version of the original legend of
earlier date, and as such contrasts with a story really dating
from early in the fifteenth century William Staunton's
descent into Purgatory, where the themes of the old
sincerely-believed visionary lore are fading into moral
allegory, and the traveller sees the gay gold and silver
collars and girdles burning into the wearer's flesh, and the
jags that men were clothed in now become adders and
dragons, sucking and stinging them, and the fiends drawing
down the skin of women's shoulders into pokes, and smiting
into their heads with burning hammers their gay chaplets
of gold and jewels turned to burning nails, and so forth.
Late in this fifteenth century, St. Patrick's Purgatory fell
into discredit, but even the destruction of the entrance-
building, in 1479, by Papal order, did not destroy the ideal
road. About 1693, an excavation on the spot brought to
light a window with iron stanchions ; there was a cry for

LOCALIZATION OF FUTURE LIFE. 59

holy water to keep the spirits from breaking out from prison,
and the priest smelt brimstone from the dark cavity below,
which, however, unfortunately turned out to be a cellar. In
still later times, the yearly pilgrimage of tens of thousands
of votaries to the holy place has kept up this interesting
survival from the lower culture, whereby a communication
may still be traced, if not from Earth to Hades, at least
from the belief of the New Zealander to that of the Irish
peasant.

To study and compare the ideal regions where man has
placed the abodes of departed souls is not an unprofitable
task. True, geography has now mapped out into mere earth
and water the space that lay beyond the narrower sea and
land known to the older nations, and astronomy no longer
recognizes the flat earth trodden by men as being the roof
of subterranean halls, nor the sky as being a solid firma-
ment, shutting out men's gaze from strata or spheres of
empyraean regions beyond. Yet if we carry our minds back
to the state of knowledge among the lower races, we shall
not find it hard to understand the early conceptions as to
the locality of the regions beyond the grave. They are no
secrets of high knowledge made known to sages of old;
they are the natural fancies which childlike ignorance
would frame in any age. The regularity with which such
conceptions repeat themselves over the world bears testi-
mony to the regularity of the processes by which opinion
is formed among mankind. At the same time, the student
who carefully compares them will find in them a perfect
illustration of an important principle, widely applicable to
the general theory of the formation of human opinion.
When a problem has presented itself to mankind at large,
susceptible of a number of solutions about equally plausible,
the result is that the several opinions thus produced will be
found lying scattered in country after country. The problem
here is, given the existence of souls of the dead who from
time to time visit the living, where is the home of these
ghosts ? Why men in one district should have preferred

60 ANIMISM.

the earth, in another the under-world, in another the sky,
as the abode of departed souls, is a question often difficult
to answer. But we may at least see how again and again
the question was taken in hand, and how out of the three or
fpur available answers some peoples adopted one, some
another, some several at once. Primitive theologians had
all the world before them where to choose their place of
rest for the departed, and they used to the full their
speculative liberty.

Firstly, when the land of souls is located on the surface
of the earth, there is choice of fit places among wild and
cloudy precipices, in secluded valleys, in far-off plains and
islands. In Borneo, Mr. St. John visited the heaven of the
Idaan race, on the summit of Kina Balu, and the native
guides, who feared to pass the night in this abode of spirits,
showed the traveller the moss on which the souls of their
ancestors fed, and the footprints of the ghostly buffaloes
that followed them. On Gunung Danka, a mountain in
West Java, there is such another ' Earthly Paradise.' The
Sajira who dwell in the district indeed profess themselves
Mohammedans, but they secretly maintain their old belief,
and at death or funeral they enjoin the soul in solemn form
to set aside the Moslem Allah, and to take the way to the
dwelling-place of his own forefathers' souls :

' Step up the bed of the river, and cross the neck of land,
Where the aren trees stand in a clump, and the pinangs in a row,
Thither direct thy steps, Laillah being set aside.'

Mr. Jonathan Rigg had lived ten years among these people,
and knew them well, yet had never found out that their
paradise was on this mountain. When at last he heard of
it, he made the ascent, finding on the top only a few river-
stones, forming one of the balai, or sacred cairns, common
in the district. But the popular belief, that a tiger would
devour the chiefs who permitted a violation of the sacred
place, soon received the sort of confirmation which such
beliefs receive everywhere, for a tiger killed two children a

LOCALIZATION OF FUTURE LIFE. 6l

few days later, and the disaster was of course ascribed to
Mr. Rigg's profanation. 1 The Chilians said that the soul
goes westward over the sea to Gulcheman, the dwelling-
place of the dead beyond the mountains ; life, some said,
was all pleasure there, but others thought that part would
be happy and part miserable. 2 Hidden among the moun-
tains of Mexico lay the joyous garden-land of Tlalocan,
where maize, and pumpkins, and chilis, and tomatos never
failed, and where abode the souls of children sacrificed to
Tlaloc, its god, and the souls of such as died by drowning
or thunderstroke, or by leprosy or dropsy, or other acute
disease. 3 A survival of such thought may be traced into
mediaeval civilization, in the legends of the Earthly Para-
dise, the fire-girt abode of saints not yet raised to highest
bliss, localized in the utmost East of Asia, where earth
stretches up towards heaven. 4 When Columbus sailed west-
ward across the Atlantic to seek ' the new heaven and the
new earth ' he had read of in Isaiah, he found them, though
not as he sought. It is a quaint coincidence that he found
there also, though not as he sought it, the Earthly Paradise
which was another main object of his venturous quest. The
Haitians described to the white men their Coaibai, the
paradise of the dead, in the lovely Western valleys of their
island, where the souls hidden by day among the cliffs came
down at night to feed on the delicious fruit of the mamey-
trees, of which the living ate but sparingly, lest the souls of
their friends should want. 6

Secondly, there are Australians who think that the spirit
of the dead hovers awhile on earth and goes at last toward

1 St. John, ' Far East,' vol. i. p. 278. Rigg. in ' Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol.
iv. p. 119. See also Ellis, ' Polyn. Res.' vol. i. p. 397; Bastian, ' Oestl.
Asien,' vol. i. p. 83 ; Irving, ' Astoria,' p. 142.

2 Molina, ' Chili,' vol. ii. p. 89.

8 Brasseur, 'Mexique,' vol. iii. p. 496; Sahagun, iii. App. c. 2, x. c. 29;
Clavigcro, vol. ii. p. 5.

4 See 'Wright, I.e. &c. ; Alger, p. 391 ; &c.

5 ' History of Colon,' ch. 61 ; Pet. Martyr. Dec. i. lib. ix. ; Irving, ' Life
of Columbus,' vol. ii. p. 121.

62 ANIMISM.

the setting sun, or westward over the sea to the island of
souls, the home of his fathers. Thus these rudest savages
have developed two thoughts which we meet with again and
again far onward in the course of culture the thought of
an island of the dead, and the thought that the world of
departed souls is in the West, whither the Sun descends at
evening to his daily death. 1 Among the North American
Indians, when once upon a time an Algonqum hunter left
his body behind and visited the land of souls in the sunny
south, he saw before him beautiful trees and plants, but
found he could walk right through them. Then he paddled
in the canoe of white shining stone across the lake where
wicked souls perish in the storm, till he reached the beau-
tiful and happy island where there is no cold, no war, no
bloodshed, but the creatures run happily about, nourished
by the air they breathe. 2 Tongan legend says that, long
ago, a canoe returning from Fiji was driven by stress of
weather to Bolotu, the island of gods and souls lying in
the ocean north-west of Tonga. That island is larger
than all theirs together, full of all finest fruits and loveliest
flowers, that fill the air with fragrance, and come anew the
moment they are plucked ; birds of beauteous plumage
are there, and hogs in plenty, all immortal save when
killed for the gods to eat, and then new living ones appear
immediately to fill their places. But when the hungry
crew of the canoe landed, they tried in vain to pluck the
shadowy bread-fruit, they walked through unresisting trees
and houses, even as the souls of chiefs who met them
walked unchecked through their solid bodies. Counselled
to hasten home from this land of no earthly food, the men
sailed to Tonga, but the deadly air of Bolotu had infected
them, and they soon all died. 3

1 Stanbridge in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. i. p. 299 ; G. F. Moore, ' Vocab. W.
Austr.' p. 83 ; Bonwick, ' Tasmanians,' p. 181.

1 School craft, ' Indian Tribes,' part i. p. 321 ; see part Hi. p. 229.

8 Mariner, ' Tonga Is.' vol. ii. p. 107. See also Burton, ' W. and W. fr.
W. Africa,' p. 154 (Gold Coast).

ISLES OF BLEST. 63

Such ideas took strong hold on classic thought, in the
belief in a paradise in the Fortunate Islands of the far
Western Ocean. Hesiod in the ' Works and Days ' tells of
the half-gods of the Fourth Age, between the Age of
Bronze and the Age of Iron. When death closed on this
heroic race, Zeus granted them at the ends of Earth a life
and home, apart from man and far from the immortals.
There Kronos reigns over them, and they dwell careless in
the Islands of the Happy, beside deep-eddying Ocean
blest heroes, for whom the grain-giving field bears, thrice
blooming yearly, the honey-sweet fruit :

*Ev$ 7/Tot TOVS ncv 6a.va.Tov reXos

Tots 8e 8ix dvdpwTTiav PIOTOV KO.I ride oVcwrxras

Zevs Kpov'iSrjs /caTtvcurcre Trcmjp es vtipa.ro. yairjs,

TrjAoiI UTT' d8a.va.Ttav Totcrw Kpovov /x/3a<rtA.fVf

Kai Tol fjiev vcuowiv dxTjSea dvfjiov e'xovres

'Ev fjMKapwv in'jo-ouri Trap' flfceavbv /3a$v8tVTjv,

*QX(3ioi Tiptoes, Tolmv fj^XirjSfa KapTrov

Tpis Tos 6d\\ovTa 4>epe>- ei8<apo<s apovpa.' l

These Islands of the Blest, assigned as the abode of
blessed spirits of the dead, came indeed to be identified
with the Elysian Fields. Thus Pindar sings of steadfast
souls, who through three lives on either side have endured
free from injustice ; then they pass by the road of Zeus to
the tower of Kronos, where the ocean breezes blow round
the islands of the happy, blazing with golden flowers of land
and water. Thus, also, in the famous hymn of Kallistratos
in honour of Harmodios and Aristogeiton, who slew the
tyrant Hipparchos :

4 4iA.Ta#' 'Ap/xdSt, ov TI irw
N^o-ois 8 fv iia.Ka.pwv a~ (patrlv eivcu,
"Iva Tep 7To8ci>KT;s AxtXAei's,
TvSetSr/v re </>ao*i rbv eo-^A5' Atoju,?j8a.' r

This group of legends has especial interest to us English-
men, who ourselves dwell, it seems, on such an island of the

* Hesiod. Opera et Dies, 1615. Pindar, Olymp. ii. antistr. 4. Callistrat.
Hymn, in Ilgen, Scolia Graca, 10. Strabo, iii. 2, 13 ; Plin. iv. 36.

64 ANIMISM.

dead. It is not that we or our country are of a more ghostly
nature than others, but the idea is geographical we are
dwellers in the region of the setting sun, the land of death.
The elaborate account by Procopius, the historian of the
Gothic War, dates from the 6th century. The island of
Brittia, according to him, lies opposite the mouths of the
Rhine, some 200 stadia off, between Britannia and Thule,
and on it dwell three populous nations, the Angles, Frisians,
and Britons. (By Brittia, it appears, he means our Great
Britain, his Britannia being the coast-land from modern
Brittany to Holland, and his Thule being Scandinavia.)
In the course of his history it seems to him needful to record
a story, mythic and dreamlike as he thinks, yet which
numberless men vouch for as having been themselves wit-
nesses by eye and ear to its facts. This story is that the
souls of the departed are conveyed across the sea to the
island of Brittia. Along the mainland coast are many
villages, inhabited by fishermen and tillers of the soil
and traders to this island in their vessels. They are sub-
ject to the Franks, but pay no tribute, having from of old
had to do by turns the burdensome service of transporting
the souls. Those on duty for each night stay at home till
they hear a knocking at the doors, and a voice of one unseen
calling them to their work. Then without delay rising from
their beds, compelled by some unknown power they go down
to the beach, and there they see boats, not their own but
others, lying ready but empty of men. Going on board and
taking the oars, they find that by the burden of the multi-
tude of souls embarked, the vessel lies low in the water,
gunwale under within a finger's breadth. In an hour they
are at the opposite shore, though in their own boats they
would hardly make the voyage in a night and day. When
they reach the island, the vessel becomes empty, till it is so
light that only the keel touches the waves. They see no
man on the voyage, no man at the landing, but a voice is
heard that proclaims the name and rank and parentage of
each newly arrived passenger, or if women, those of their

HADES. 65

husbands. Traces of this remarkable legend seem to have
survived, thirteen centuries later, in that endmost district
of the Britannia of Procopius which still keeps the name
of Bretagne. Near Raz, where the narrow promontory
stretches westward into the ocean, is the ' Bay of Souls '
(b.oe ann anavo) ; in the commune of Plouguel the corpse is
taken to the churchyard, not by the shorter road by land,
but in a boat by the ' Passage de 1'Enfer,' across a. little
arm of the sea ; and Breton folk-lore holds fast to the legend
of the Cure" de Braspar, whose dog leads over to Great
Britain the souls of the departed, when the wheels of the
soul-car are heard creaking in the air. These are but
mutilated fragments, but they seem to piece together with
another Keltic myth, told by Macpherson in the last century,
the voyage of the boat of heroes to Flath-Innis, Noble
Island, the green island home of the departed, which lies
calm amid the storms far in the Western Ocean. With full
reason, also, Mr. Wright traces to the situation of Ireland
in the extreme West its especial association with legends of
descents to the land of shades. Claudian placed at the
extremity of Gaul the entrance where Ulysses found a way
to Hades

' Est locus extremum qua pandit Gallia litus,
Oceani praetentus aquis, ubi fertur Ulysses,' &c.

No wonder that this spot should have been since identi-
fied with St. Patrick's Purgatory, and that some ingenious
etymologist should have found in the name of ' Ulster ' a
corruption of ' Ulyssisterra,' and a commemoration of the
hero's visit. 1

Thirdly, the belief in a subterranean Hades peopled by
the ghosts of the dead is quite common among the lower
races. The earth is flat, say the Italmen of Kamchatka,

1 Procop. De Bello Goth. iv. 20 ; Plut. Fragm. Comm. in Hesiod. 2 ;
Grimm, ' D. M.' p. 793 ; Hers art de Villemarque", vol. i. p. 136 ; Souvestre,
' Derniers Bretons,' p. 37 ; Jas. Macpherson, ' Introd. to Hist, of Great
Britain and Ireland,' 2nd ed. London, 1772, p. 180 ; Wright, 'St. Patrick's
Purgatory,' pp. 64, 129.

66 ANIMISM.

for if it were round, people would fall off ; it is the wrong
side of another heaven, which covers another earth below,
whither the dead will go down to their new life, and so, as
Steller says, their mundane system is like a tub with three
bottoms. 1 In North America, the Tacullis held that the
soul goes after death into the bowels of the earth, whence
it can come back in human shape to visit friends.* In
South America, Brazilian souls travel down to the world
below in the West, and Patagonian souls will depart to
enjoy eternal drunkenness in the caves of their ancestral
deities. 3 The New Zealander who says ' The sun has re-
turned to Hades ' (kua hoki mai te Ra ki te Rua), simply
means that it has set. When a Samoan Islander dies, the
host of spirits that surround the house, waiting to convey
his soul away, set out with him crossing the land and
swimming the sea, to the entrance of the spirit-world.
This is at the westernmost point of the westernmost island,
Savaii, and there one may see the two circular holes or
basins where souls descend, chiefs by the bigger and
plebeians by the smaller, into the regions of the under-
world. There below is a heaven, earth, and sea, and
people with real bodies, planting, fishing, cooking, as in the
present life ; but at night their bodies become like a con-
fused collection of fiery sparks, and in this state during the
hours of darkness they come up to revisit their former
abodes, retiring at dawn to the bush or to the lower
regions. 4 For the state of thought on this subject among
rude African tribes, it is enough to cite the Zulus, who at
death will descend to live in Hades among their ancestors,
the ' Abapansi,' the ' people underground.' 5 Among rude
Asiatic tribes, such an example may be taken from the

1 Steller, ' Kamtschatka,' p. 269.

2 Harmon, ' Journal,' p. 299 ; see Lewis and Clarke, p. 139 (Mandans).

3 J. G. Muller, ' Amer. Urrelig.' pp. 140, 287 ; see Humboldt and Bon-
pland, ' Voy.' vol. iii. p. 132; Falkner, 'Patagonia,' p. 114.

* Taylor, ' New Zealand,' p. 232 ; Turner, ' Polynesia,' p. 235.
8 Callaway, 'Zulu Tales,' vol. i. p. 317, &c. ; Arbousset and Daumas,
p. 474. See also Burton, ' Dahome,' vol. ii. p. 157.

HADES. 67

Karens. They are not quite agreed where Plu, the land of
the dead, is situate ; it may be above the earth or beyond
the horizon. But the dominant and seemingly indigenous
opinion is that it is below the earth. When the sun sets on
earth, it rises in the Karen Hades, and when it sets in
Hades it rises in this world. Here, again, the familiar
belief of the European peasant is found ; the spirits of the
dead may come up from the land of shades by night, but
at daybreak must return. 1

Such ideas, developed by uncultured races, may be fol-
lowed up in various detail, through the stage of religion re-
presented by the Mexican and Peruvian nations, 2 into higher
ranges of culture. The Roman Orcus was in the bowels of
the earth, and when the ' lapis manalis,' the stone that
closed the mouth of the world below, was moved away on
certain solemn days, the ghosts of the dead came up to the
world above, and partook of the offerings of their friends. 3
Among the Greeks, the Land of Hades was in the world
below, nor was the thought unknown that it was the sunset
realm of the Western god (irpfa ffnrepov deov). What Hades
seemed like to the popular mind, Lucian thus describes :
' The great crowd, indeed, whom the wise call " idiots,"
believing Homer and Hesiod, and the other myth-makers
about these things, and setting up their poetry as a law,
have supposed a certain deep place under the earth, Hades,
and that it is vast, and roomy, and gloomy, and sunless,
and how thought to be lighted up so as to behold every one
within, I know not.' 4 In the ancient Egyptian doctrine of
the future life, modelled on solar myth, the region of the
departed combines the under- world and the west, Amenti ;
the dead passes the gate of the setting sun to traverse the
roads of darkness, and behold his father Osiris ; and with

1 Mason, ' Karens,' I.e. p. 195 ; Cross, I.e. p. 313. Turanian examples
in Castren, ' Finn. Myth." p. 119.

2 See below, pp. 79, 85.

3 Festus, s.v. ' manalis,' &c.

4 Sophocl. (Edip. Tyrann. 178 ; Lucian. De Luctu, ^, See classic details
in Pauly, ' Real-Encyclop.' art. ' inferi."

68 ANIMISM.

this solar thought the Egyptian priests, representing in
symbolic ceremony the scenes of the other world, carried
the corpse in the sacred boat across to the burial-place, on
the western side of the sacred lake. 1 So, too, the cavernous
Sheol of the Israelites, the shadowy region of departed
souls, lay deep below the earth. Through the great Aryan
religious systems, Brahmanism, Zarathustrism, Buddhism,
and onward into the range of Islam and of Christianity,
subterranean hells of purgatory or punishment make the
doleful contrast to heavens of light and glory.

It is, however, a point worthy of special notice that the
conception of hell as a fiery abyss, so familiar to the religions
of the higher civilization, is all but unknown to savage
thought, so much so that if met with, its genuineness is
doubtful. Captain John Smith's ' History of Virginia,'
published in 1624, contains two different accounts of the
Indians' doctrine of a future life. Smith's own description
is of a land beyond the mountains, toward sunset, where
chiefs and medicine-men in paint and feathers shall smoke,
and sing, and dance with their forefathers, while the common
people have no life after death, but rot in their graves.
Heriot's description is of tabernacles of the gods to which
the good are taken up to perpetual happiness, while the
wicked are carried to ' Popogusso,' a great pit which they
think to be at the furthes parts of the world where the sun
sets, and there burn continually. 1 Now knowing so much
as we do of the religion of the Algonquins, to whom these
Virginians belonged, we may judge that while the first
account is genuinely native, though perhaps not quite cor-
rectly understood, the second was borrowed by the Indians
from the white men themselves. Yet even here the touch
of solar myth is manifest, and the description of the fiery
abyss in the region of sunset may be compared with one

1 Birch in Bunsen's ' Egypt,' vol. v. ; Wilkinson, ' Ancient Eg.' vol. ii.
p. 368 ; Alger, p. 101. ,

* Smith, ' History of Virginia,' in ' Works ' cd. bf Arber ; Pinkerton,
vol. xiii. pp. 14, 41 ; vol. xii. p. $04 ; see below, p. 95.

SUN, MOON, AND STARS. 69

from our own country, in the Anglo-Saxon dialogue of
Saturn and Solomon. ' Saga me forhwan byth seo sunne
read on aefen ? Ic the secge, forthon heo locath on helle.
Tell me, why is the sun red at even ? I tell thee,
because she looketh on hell >l To the same belief belongs
another striking mythic feature. The idea of volcanos
being mouths of the under-world seems not unexampled
among the lower races, for we hear of certain New Zealanders
casting their dead down into a crater. 2 But in connexion
with the thought of a gehenna of fire and brimstone,
Vesuvius, Etna, and Hecla had spiritual as well as material
terrors to the mind of Christendom, for they were believed
to be places of purgatory or the very mouths of the pit
where the souls of the damned were cast down. 3 The
Indians of Nicaragua used in old times to offer human
sacrifices to their volcano Masaya, flinging the corpses into
the crater, and in later years, after the conversion of the
country, we hear of Christian confessors sending their
penitents to climb the mountain, and (as a glimpse of hell)
to look down upon the molten lava. 4

Fourthly, in old times and new, it has come into men's
minds to fix upon the sun and moon as abodes of departed
souls. When we have learnt from the rude Natchez of the
Mississippi and the Apalaches of Florida that the sun is
the bright dwelling of departed chiefs and braves, and have
traced like thoughts on into the theologies of Mexico and
Peru, then we may compare these savage doctrines with
Isaac Taylor's ingenious supposition in his ' Physical
Theory of Another Life,' the sun of each planetary S3^stem
is the house of the higher and ultimate spiritual corporeity,
and the centre of assembly to those who have passed on the
planets their preliminary, era of corruptible organization.
Or perhaps some may prefer the Rev. Tobias Swinden's

1 Thorpe, ' Analecta Anglo-Saxonica,' p. 115.

2 Schirren, p. 151. See Taylor, ' N. Z.' p. 525.

* Meiners, vol. ii. p. 781 ; Maury, ' Magic,' &c. p. 170.

* Oviedo, ' Nicaragua,' p. 160 ; Brinton, p. 288.

7O ANIMISM.

book, published in the last century, and translated into
French and German, which proved the sun to be hell, and
its dark spots gatherings of damned souls. 1 And when in
South America the Saliva Indians have pointed out the
moon, their paradise where no mosquitos are, and the
Guaycurus have shown it as the home of chiefs and
medicine-men deceased, and the Polynesians of Tokelau in
like manner have claimed it as the abode of departed kings
and chiefs, then these pleasant fancies may be compared
with Plutarch's description of the virtuous souls who after
purification in the middle space gain their footing on the
moon, and there are crowned as victors. 8 The converse
notion of the moon as the seat of hell, has been elaborated
in profoundest bathos by Mr. M. F. Tupper :

' I know thee well. Moon, thou cavern'd realm,
Sad Satellite, thou e iant ash of death,
Blot on God's firmament, pale home of crime,
Scarr'd prison-house of sin, where damned souls
Feed upon punishment. Oh, thought sublime,
That amid night's black deeds, when evil prowls
Through the broad world, thou, watching sinners well,
Glarest o'er all, the wakeful eye of Hell ! '

Skin for skin, the brown savage is not ill matched in such
speculative lore with the white philosopher.

Fifthly, as Paradise on the face of the earth, and Hades
beneath it where the sun goes down, are regions whose
existence is asserted or not denied by savage and barbaric
science, so it is with Heaven. Among the examples which
display for us the real course of knowledge among mankind,
and the real relation which primitive bears to later culture,
the belief in the existence of a firmament is one of the most

1 J. G. Muller, ' Amer. Urrel.' p. 138, see also 220 (Caribs), 402 (Peru),
505, 660 (Mexico) ; Brinton, ' Myths of New World,' p. 233 ; Taylor,
' Physical Theory,' ch. xvi. ; Alger, ' Future Life,' p. 590 ; see also above,
p. 1 6, note.

1 Humboldt and Bonpland, ' Voy.' vol. v. p. 90 ; Martius, ' Ethnog.
Amer.' vol. i. p. 233 j Turner, ' Polynesia,' p. 531 ; Plutarch. De Facie in
Orbe Luna- ; Bastian, ' Psychologic,' pp. 80, 89 (souls in stars).

HEAVEN. 71

instructive. It arises naturally in the minds of children
still, and in accordance with the simplest childlike thought,
the cosmologies of the North American Indians l and the
South Sea Islanders * describe their flat earth arched over
by the solid vault of heaven. Like thoughts are to be
traced on through such details as the Zulu idea that the
blue heaven is a rock encircling the earth, inside which are
the sun, moon, and stars, and outside which dwell the
people of heaven ; the modern negro's belief that there is a
firmament stretched above like a cloth or web ; the Finnish
poem which tells how Ilmarinen forged the firmament of
finest steel, and set in it the moon and stars. 3 The New
Zealander, with his notion of a solid firmament, through
which the waters can be let down on earth through a crack
or hole from the reservoir of rain above, could well explain
the passage in Herodotus concerning that place in North
Africa where, as the Libyans said, the sky is pierced, as
well as the ancient Jewish conception of a firmament of
heaven, ' strong as a molten mirror,' with its windows
through which the rain pours down in deluge from the
reservoirs above, windows which late Rabbinical literature
tells us were made by taking out two stars. 4 In nations
where the theory of the firmament prevails, accounts of
bodily journeys or spiritual ascents to heaven are in general
meant not as figure, but as fact. Among the lower races,
the tendency to localize the region of departed souls above
the sky seems less strong than that which leads them to
place their world of the dead on or below the earth's sur-
face. Yet some well-marked descriptions of a savage

1 See Schoolcraft, ' Indian Tribes,' part i. pp. 269, 311; Smith, ' Virginia,'
in Pinkerton, vol. xiii. p. 54 ; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 223 ; Squier, ' Abor. Mon.
of N. Y.' p. 156 ; Catlin, ' N. A. Ind.' vol. i. p. 180.

1 Mariner, 'Tonga Is.' vol. ii. p. 134; Turner, 'Polynesia,' p. 103;
Taylor, ' New Zealand,' pp. 101, 114, 256.

3 Callaway, ' Rel. of Amazulu,' p. 393 ; Burton, ' W. and W. fr. W. Afr.'
p. 454 ; Castr^n, ' Finn. Myth.' p. 295.

4 Herodot, iv. 158, see 185, and Rawiin son's note. See Smith's ' Die. of
the Bible,' s.v. ' firmament.' Eisenmenger, part i. p. 408.

72 ANIMISM.

Heaven are on record, the following, and others to be cite
presently. Even some Australians seem to think of goir
up to the clouds at death, to eat and drink, and hunt an<
fish as here. 1 In North America, the Winnebagos placed
their paradise in the sky, where souls travel along that
' Path of the Dead ' which we call the Milky Way ; and
working out the ever-recurring solar idea, the modern
Iroquois speak of the soul going upward and westward, till
it comes out on the beauteous plains of heaven, with people
and trees and things as on earth.* In South America the
Guarayos, representatives in some sort of the past condition
of the Guarani race, worship Tamoi the Grandfather, the
Ancient of Heaven ; he was their first ancestor, who lived
among them in old days and taught them to till the ground;
then rising to heaven in the East he disappeared, having
promised to be the helper of his people on earth, and to
transport them, when they died, from the top of a sacred
tree into another life, where they shall find their kindred
and have hunting in plenty, and possess all that they
possessed on earth; therefore it is that the Guarayos adorn
their dead, and burn their weapons for them, and bury
them with their faces to the East, whither they are to go.*
Among American peoples whose culture rose to a higher
level than that of these savage tribes, we hear of the
Peruvian Heaven, the glorious ' Upper World,' and of
the temporary abode of Aztec warriors on heavenly wooded
plains, where the sun shines when it is night on earth,
wherefore it was a Mexican saying that the sun goes at
evening to lighten the dead.* What thoughts of heaven
were in the minds of the old Aryan poets, this hymn
from the Rig- Veda may show :

1 Eyre, ' Australia,' vol. ii. p. 367.

* Schoolcraft, ' Indian Tribe*,' part iv. p. 240 (but compare part v.
p. 403) ; Morgan, ' Iroquois,' p. 176 ; Sproat, ' Savage Life,' p. 209.

* D'Orbigny, ' L'Homme Americain,' vol. ii. pp. 319, 328 ; see Martius,
vol. i. p. 485 (Jumanas).

4 J. G. Muller, p. 403 ; Brasseur, ' Mexique,' vol. iii. p. 496 ; Kings-
borough, ' Mexico,' Cod. Letellier, fol. 20.

HEAVEN. 73

' Where there is eternal light, in the world where the sun is placed, in that
immortal imperishable world place me, O Soma !

Where king Vaivasvata reigns, where the secret place of heaven is, where
these mighty waters are, there make me immortal !

Where life is free, in the third heaven of heavens, where the worlds are
radiant, there make me immortal !

Where wishes and desires are, where the place of the bright sun is, where
there is freedom and delight, there make me immortal !

Where there is happiness and delight, where joy and pleasure reside,
where the desires of our desire are attained, there make me immortal ! ' x

In such bright vague thoughts from the poet's religion of
nature, or in cosmic schemes of ancient astronomy, with
their artificial glories of barbaric architecture exaggerated
in the skies, or in the raptures of mystic vision, or in
the calmer teaching of the theologic doctrine of a future
life, descriptions of realms of blessed souls in heaven are
to be followed through the religions of the Brahman, the
Buddhist, the Parsi, the later Jew, the Moslem, and the
Christian.

For the object, not of writing a handbook of religions,
but of tracing the relation which the religion of savages
bears to the religion of cultured nations, these details are
enough to show the general line of human thought regard-
ing the local habitations of departed souls. It seems plain
from the most cursory inspection of these various localiza-
tions, however much we may consider them as inherited or
transmitted from people to people in the complex move-
ments of theological history, that they are at any rate not
derived from any single religion accepted among ancient or
primaeval men. They bear evident traces of independent
working out in the varied definition of the region of souls,
as on earth among men, on earth in some distant country,
below the earth, above or Treyond the sky. Similar ideas
of this kind are found in different lands, but this simi-

1 Max Muller, ' Chips,' vol. i. p. 46 ; Roth in ' Zeitschr. d. Deutsch.
Morgenl. Ges.' vol. iv. p. 427.

li r

74 ANIMISM.

larity seems in large measure due to independent re-
currence of thoughts so obvious. Not less is independent
fancy compatible with the ever-recurring solar myth in such
ideas, placing the land of Death in the land of Evening or
of Night, and its entrance at the gates of Sunset. Barbaric
poets of many a distant land must have gazed into the West
to read the tale of Life and Death, and tell it of Man. If,
however, we look more closely into the stages of intellectual
history to which these theories of the Future World belong,
it will appear that the assignment of the realm of departed
souls to the three great regions, Earth, Hades, Heaven, has
not been uniform. Firstly, the doctrine of a land of souls
on Earth belongs widely and deeply to savage culture, but
dwindles in the barbaric stage, and survives but feebly into
the mediaeval. Secondly, the doctrine of a subterranean
Hades holds as large a place as this in savage belief , and
has held it firmly along the course of higher religions,
where, however, this under- world is looked on less and less
as the proper abode of the dead, but rather as the dismal
place of purgatory and hell. Lastly, the doctrine of a
Heaven, floored upon a firmament, or placed in the upper
air, seems in early savage belief less common than the other
two, but yields to neither of them in its vigorous retention
by the thought of modern nations. These local theories
appear to be taken, firstly and mostly, in the most absolute
literal sense, and although, under the influence of physical
science, much that was once distinctly-meant philosophy has
now passed among theologians into imagery and metaphor,
yet at low levels of knowledge the new canons of interpre-
tation find little acceptance, and even in modern Europe the
rude cosmology of the lower races in no small measure
retains its place.

Turning now to consider the state of the departed in
these their new homes, we have to examine the definitions
of the Future Life which prevail through the religions of
mankind. In these doctrines there is much similarity
caused by the spreading of established beliefs into new

CONCEPTIONS OF FUTURE LIFE. 75

countries, and also much similarity that is beyond what
such transmission can account for. So there is much variety
due to local colour and circumstance, and also much variety
beyond the reach of such explanation. The main causes of
both similarity and variety seem to lie far deeper, in the
very origin and inmost meaning of the doctrines. The
details of the future life, among the lower races and up-
wards, are no heterogeneous mass of arbitrary fancies.
Classified, they range themselves naturally round central
ideas, in groups whose correspondence seems to indicate the
special course of their development. Amongst the pictures
into which this world has shaped its expectations of the
next, two great conceptions are especially to be discerned.
The one is that the future life is, as it were, a reflexion of
this ; in a new world, perhaps of dreamy beauty, perhaps
of ghostly gloom, men are to retain their earthly forms and
their earthly conditions, to have around them their earthly
friends, to possess their earthly property, to carry on their
earthly occupations. The other is that the future life is a
compensation for this, where men's conditions are re-allotted
as the consequence, and especially as the reward or punish-
ment, of their earthly life. The first of these two ideas we
may call (with Captain Burton) the ' continuance-theory,'
contrasting with it the second as the ' retribution-theory.'
Separately or combined, these two doctrines are the keys
of the subject, and by grouping typical examples under
their two headings, it will be possible to survey systematic-
ally man's most characteristic schemes of his life beyond
the grave.

To the doctrine of Continuance belongs especially the
savage view of the spirit-land, that it is as the dream-
land where the souls of the living so often go to visit
the souls of the dead. There the soul of the dead' Karen,
with the souls of his axe and cleaver, builds his house
and cuts his rice ; the shade of the Algonquin hunter
hunts souls of beaver and elk, walking on the souls of
his snow-shoes over the soul of the snow ; the fur-wrapped

76 ANIMISM.

Kamchadal drives his dog-sledge ; the Zulu milks his
cows and drives his cattle to kraal ; South American
tribes live on, whole or mutilated, healthy or sick, as
they left this world, leading their old lives, and having
their wives with them again, though indeed, as the Arau-
canians said, they "have no more children, for they are but
souls. 1 Soul-land is dream-land in its shadowy unreal
pictures, for which, nevertheless, material reality so plainly
furnished the models, and it is dream-land also in its vivid
idealization of the soberer thoughts and feelings of waking
life,

' There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem
ApparelTd in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.'

Well might the Mohawk Indian describe the good land of
paradise, as he had seen it in a dream. The shade of the
Ojibwa follows a wide and beaten path that leads toward the
West, he crosses a deep and rapid water, and reaching a
country full of game and all things the Indian covets, he
joins his kindred in their long lodge. 2 So, on the southern
continent, the Bolivian Yuracares will go, all of them, to a
future life where there will be plenty of hunting, and
Brazilian forest-tribes will find a pleasant forest full of
calabash-trees and game, where the souls of the dead will
live happily in company. 3 The Greenlanders hoped that
their souls pale, soft, disembodied forms which the living
could not grasp would lead a life better than that of earth,
and never ceasing. It might be in heaven, reached by the

1 Cross, ' Karens,' I.e. pp. 309, 313 ; Le Jeune in ' Rel. des Jis.' 1634,
p. 16 ; Steller, ' Kamtschatka,' p. 272 ; Callaway, ' Zulu Tales,' vol. i. p. 316;
Klemm, ' Cultur-Gesch.' vol. ii. pp. 310, 315 ; J. G. Miiller, ' Amer. Urrel.'
pp. 139,286.

1 Bastian, ' Psychologic,' p. 224 ; Schoolcraft, ' Indian Tribes,' part ii.

P- 135-

3 D'Orbigny, ' L'Homme Amlricain,' vol. i. p. 364 ; Spix and Martius,
' Brasilien,' vol. i. p. 383 ; De Laet, Novus Orbis, xv. 2.

CONTINUANCE THEORY. 77

rainbow, where the souls pitch their tents round the great
lake rich in fish and fowl, the lake whose waters above the
firmament overflowing make rain on earth, and if its banks
broke, there would be another deluge. But gaining the
most and best of their living from the depths of the sea,
they were also apt to think the land of Torngarsuk to be
below the sea or earth, and to be entered by the deep holes
in the rocks. Perpetual summer is there, ever beauteous
sunshine, and no night, good water and superfluity of birds
and fish, seals and reindeer to be caught without difficulty,
or found alive seething in a great kettle. 1 In the Kimbunda
country of South- West Africa, souls live on in ' Kalunga,'
the world where it is day when it is night here ; and with
plenty of food and drink, and women to serve them, and
hunting and dancing for pastime, they lead a life which
seems a corrected edition of this.* On comparison of these
pictures of the future life with such as have expressed the
longings of more cultured nations, there appear indeed
different details, but the principle is ever the same the
idealization of earthly good. The Norseman's ideal is
sketched in the few broad touches which show him in Wal-
halla, where he and the other warriors without number ride
forth arrayed each morning and hew each other on Odin's
plain, till the slain have been ' chosen ' as in earthly battle,
and meal-tide comes, and slayers and slain mount and ride
home to feast on the everlasting boar, and drink mead and
ale with the /Esir. 9 To understand the Moslem's mind,
we must read the two chapters of the Koran where the
Prophet describes the faithful in the garden of delights,
reclining on their couches of gold and gems, served by
children ever young, with bowls of liquor whose fumes will
npt rise into the drinkers' heads, living among the thorn-
less lotus-trees and date-palms loaded to the ground, feasting
on the fruits they love and the meat of the rarest birds,
with the houris near them with beautiful black eyes, like

1 Cranz, ' Gronland,' p. 258. Magyar, ' Siid-Afrika,' p. 336.

8 Edda : ' Gylfaginning."

78 ANIMISM.

pearls in the shell, where no idle or wicked speech is heard,
but only the words ' Peace, Peace.'

' They who fear the judgment of God shall have two gardens.
Which of the benefits of God will ye deny ?
Adorned with groves.

Which of the benefits of God will ye deny ?
In each of them shall spring two fountains.
Which of the benefits of God will ye deny ?
In each of them shall grow two kinds of fruits.
Which of the benefits of God will ye deny ?
They shall lie on carpets brocaded with silk and embroidered with gold ;

the fruits of the two gardens shall be near, easy to pluck.
Which of the benefits of God will ye deny ?
There shall be young virgins with modest looks, unprofaned by man or

jinn.

Which of the benefits of God will ye deny ?
They are like jacinth and coral.
Which of the benefits of God will ye deny ?
What is the recompence of good, if not good ?
Which of the benefits of God will ye deny ? ' &c. l

With these descriptions of Paradise idealized on secular
life, it is interesting to compare others which bear the im-
press of a priestly caste, devising a heaven after their
manner. We can almost see the faces of the Jewish rabbis
settling their opinions about the high schools in the firma-
ment of heaven, where Rabbi Simeon ben Yochai and the
great Rabbi Eliezer teach Law and Talmud as they taught
when they were here below, and masters and learners go
prosing on with the weary old disputations of cross question
and crooked answer that pleased their souls on earth. 8 Nor
less suggestively do the Buddhist heavens reflect the minds
of the ascetics who devised them. As in their thoughts
sensual pleasure seemed poor and despicable in comparison
with mystic inward joy, rising and rising till consciousness
fades in trance, so, above their heavens of millions of years
of mere divine happiness, they raised other ranges of
heavens where sensual pain and pleasure cease, and enjoy-

1 ' Koran,' ch. Iv. Ivi.

* Eisenmenger, ' Entdecktes Judenthum,' part i. p. 7.

CONTINUANCE THEORY. 79

Ihent becomes intellectual, till at a higher grade even bodily
form is gone, and after the last heaven of ' Neither-
consciousness-nor-unconsciousness ' there follows Nirwana,
as ecstasy passes into swoon. 1

But the doctrine of the continuance of the soul's life has
another and a gloomier side. There are conceptions of an
abode of the deadapharacterized not so much by dreaminess
as by ghostliness. The realm of shades, especially if it be
a cavern underground, has seemed a dim and melancholy
place to the dwellers in this ' white world/ as the Russian
calls the land of the living. One description of the Hurons
tells how the other world, with its hunting and fishing, its
much-prized hatchets and robes and necklaces, is like this
world, yet day and night the souls groan and lament. 2
Thus the region of Mictlan, the subterranean land of Hades
whither the general mass of the Mexican nation, high and
low, expected to descend from the natural death-bed, was an
abode looked forward to with resignation, but scarcely with
cheerfulness. At the funeral the survivors were bidden not
to mourn too much, the dead was reminded that he had
passed and suffered the labours of this life, transitory as
when one warms himself in the sun, and he was bidden to
have no care or anxiety to return to his kinsfolk now that
he has departed for ever and aye, for his consolation must
be that they too will end their labours, and go whither he
has gone before. 3 Among the Basutos, where the belief in
a future life in Hades is general, some imagine in this under-
world valleys ever green, and herds of hornless speckled
cattle owned by the dead ; but it seems more generally
thought that the shades wander about in silent calm,
experiencing neither joy nor sorrow. Moral retribution
there is none. 4 The Hades of the West African seems no

1 Hardy, ' Manual of Budhism,' pp. 5, 24 ; Koppen, ' Rel. des Buddha,'
vol. i. p. 235, &c.

1 Brebeuf in ' Rel. des Je"s." 1636, p. 105.

* Sahagun, ' Hist, de Nueva Espana,' book iii. appendix ch. i., in Kings-
borough, vol. vii. ; Brasseur, vol. iii. p. 571.

4 Casalis, ' Basutos,' pp. 247, 254.

So ANIMISM.

ecstatic paradise, to judge by Captain Burton's description:
' It was said of the old Egyptians that they lived rather in
Hades than upon the banks of the Nile. The Dahomans
declare that this world is man's plantation, the next is his
home, a home which, however, no one visits of his own
accord. They of course own no future state of rewards
and punishment : there the King will te a King, and the
slave a slave for ever. Ku-to-men, or Deadman's land, the
Dahoman's other but not better world, is a country of
ghosts, of umbrae, who, like the spirits of the nineteenth
century in Europe, lead a quiet life, except when by means
of mediums they are drawn into the drawing-rooms of the
living.' With some such hopeless expectation the neigh-
bours of the Dahomans, the Yorubas, judge the life to come
in their simple proverb that ' A corner in this world is
better than a corner in the world of spirits.' 1 The Finns,
who feared the ghosts of the departed as unkind, harmful
beings, fancied them dwelling with their bodies in the grave,
or else, with what Castren thinks a later philosophy, assigned
them their dwelling in the subterranean Tuonela. Tuonela
was like this upper earth, the sun shone there, there was no
lack of land and water, wood and field, tilth and meadow,
there were bears and wolves, snakes and pike, but all things
were of a hurtful, dismal kind, the woods dark and swarm-
ing with wild beasts, the water black, the cornfields bearing
seed of snakes' teeth, and there stern pitiless old Tuoni,
and his grim wife and son with the hooked fingers with iron
points, kept watch and ward over the dead lest they should
escape.* Scarce less dismal was the classic ideal of the
dark realm below, whither the shades of the dead must go
to join the many gone before (e's irAcoVuv iKr0cu; penetrare
ad plures ; andare tra i piu). The Roman Orcus holds the
pallid souls, rapacious Orcus, sparing neither good nor bad.

1 Burton, ' Dahomc,' vol. ii. p. 156 ; ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iii. p. 403 ; ' Wit
and Wisdom from W. Afr.' pp. 280, 449 ; see J. G. Miiller, p. 140.

2 Castren, ' Finn. Myth.' p. 126, &c. ; Kalewala, Rune xv. xvi. xlv. &c. ;
Meiners, vol. ii. p. 780.

CONTINUANCE THEORY. 8l

Gloomy is the Greek land of Hades, dark dwelling of the
images of departed mortals, where the shades carry at once
their living features and their dying wounds, and glide and
cluster and whisper, and lead the shadow of a life. Like
the savage hunter on his ghostly prairie, the great Orion
still bears his brazen mace, still chases over the meadows of
asphodel the flying beasts he slew of yore in the lonely
mountains. Like the rude African of to-day, the swift-
footed Achilles scorns such poor, thin, shadowy life ; rather
would he serve a mean man upon earth than be lord of all
the dead.

' Truly, oxen and goodly sheep may be taken for booty,
Tripods, too, may be bought, and the yellow beauty of horses ;
But from the fence of the teeth when once the soul is departed,
Never cometh it back, regained by plunder or purchase.' *

Where and what was Sheol, the dwelling of the ancient
Jewish dead ? Of late years the Biblical critic has no longer
to depend on passages of the Old Testament for realizing
its conception, so plainly is it connected with the seven-
circled Irkalla of the Babylonian- Assyrian religion, the
gloomy subterranean abode whence there is no return for
man, though indeed the goddess Isthar passed through its
seven gates, and came back to earth from her errand of sav-
ing all life from destruction. In the history of religions, few
passages are more instructive than those in which the
prophets of the Old Testament recognize the ancestral
connexion of their own belief with the national religions of
Babylon- Assyria, as united in the doctrine of a gloomy prison
of ghosts, through whose gates Jew and Gentile alike must
pass. Sheol (^WE'from ^>sr) is, as its name implies, a cavern-
ous recess, yet it is no mere surface-grave or tomb, but an
under-world of awful depth : ' High as Heaven, what doest
thou ? deeper than Sheol, what knowest thou ? ' Asshur
and all her company, Elam and all her multitude, the

1 Homer. II. ix. 405 ; Odyss. xi. 218, 475 ; Virg. ^n. vi. 243, &c., &c.

82 ANIMISM.

mighty fallen of the uncircumcised, lie there. The great
king of Babylon must go down :

' Sheol from beneath is moved because of thee, to meet thee at thy

coming :

He rouseth for thee the mighty dead, all the great chiefs of the earth ;
He maketh to rise up from their thrones, all the kings of the nations.
All of them shall accost thee, and shall say unto thee :
Art thou, even thou too, became weak as we ? Art thou made like
unto us ? '

To the Greek Septuagint, Sheol was Hades, and for this
the Coptic translators had their long-inherited Egyptian
name of Amenti, while the Vulgate renders it as Infernus,
the lower regions. The Gothic Ulfilas, translating the
Hades of the New Testament, could use Halja in its old
German sense of the dim shadowy home of the dead below
the earth ; and the corresponding word Hell, if this its
earlier sense be borne in mind, fairly translates Sheol
and Hades in the English version of the Old and New
Testament, though the word has become misleading to un-
educated ears by being used also in the sense of Gehenna,
the place of torment. The early Hebrew historians and
prophets, holding out neither the hope of everlasting glory
nor the fear of everlasting agony as guiding motives for
man's present life, lay down little direct doctrine of a future
state, yet their incidental mentions justify the translators
who regard Sheol as Hades. Sheol is a special locality where
dead men go to their dead ancestors : ' And Isaac gave up
the ghost, and died, and was gathered unto his people . . .
and his sons Esau and Jacob buried him.' Abraham,
though not even buried in the land of his forefathers, is thus
' gathered unto his people ; ' and Jacob has no thought of
his body being laid with Joseph's body, torn by wild beasts
in the wilderness, when he says, ' I shall go down to my
son mourning to Sheol (Vs <?8oi/ in the LXX., ' &peset
amenti ' in the Coptic, ' in infernum ' in the Vulgate).
The rephaim, the ' shades ' of the dead, who dwell in
Sheol, love not to be disturbed from their rest by the

INTERMEDIATE THEORY. 83

necromancer ; ' And Samuel said to Saul, why hast thou
disquieted me to bring me up ? ' Yet their quiet is con-
trasted in a tone of sadness with the life on earth ; ' What-
soever thy hand fmdeth to do, do it with thy might ; for
there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor widsom,
in Sheol, whither thou goest.' 1 Such thoughts of the life
of the shades below did not disappear when, in the later
years of the Jewish nation, the great change in the doctrine
of the future life passed in so large a measure over the
Hebrew mind, their earlier thoughts of ghostly continuance
giving place to the doctrines of resurrection and retribu-
tion. The ancient ideas have even held their place on into
Christian thought, in pictures like that of the Limbus
Patrum, the Hades where Christ descended to set free the
patriarchs.

The Retribution-theory of the future life comprises in a
general way the belief in different grades of future happiness,
especially in different regions of the other world allotted to
men according to their lives in this. This doctrine of re-
tribution is, as we have already seen, far from universal
among mankind, many races recognizing the idea of a spirit
outliving the body, without considering the fate of this
spirit to depend at all upon the conduct of the living man.
The doctrine of retribution indeed hardly seems an original
part of the doctrine of the future life. On the contrary, if
we judge that men in a primitive state of culture arrived at
the notion of a surviving spirit, and that some races, but by
no means all, afterwards reached the further stage of re-
cognizing a retribution for deeds done in the body, this
theory will not, so far as I know, !>e discountenanced by
facts. 2 Even among the higher savages, however, a con-

1 Gen. xxxv. 29 ; xxv. 8 ; xxxvii. 35 ; Job xi. 8 ; Amos ix. 2 ; Psalm
Ixxxix. 48 ; Ezek. xxxi., xxxii. ; Isaiah xiv. 9, xxxviii. 10-18 ; i Sam.,
xxviii. 15 ; Eccles. ix. 10. ' Records of the Past,' vol. i. pp. 141-9 ; Sayce
'Lectures on Hist, of Rel.' part ii. ; Alger, ' Critical History of the Doctrine
of a Future Life,' ch. viii.

8 The doctrine of reversal, as in Kamchatka, where rich and poor will
thange places in the other world (Steller, pp. 269-72), is too exceptional in
che lower culture to be generalized. See Steinhauser, ' Rel. des Negers,'

84 ANIMISM.

nexion between man's life and his happiness or misery after
death is often held as a definite article of theology, and
thence it is to be traced onward through barbaric religions,
and into the very heart of Christianity. Yet the grounds
of good and evil in the future life are so far from uniform
among the religions of the world, that they may differ
widely within what is considered one and the same creed.
The result is more definite than the cause, the end than the
means. Men who alike look forward to a region of un-
earthly happiness beyond the grave, hope to reach that
happy land by roads so strangely different, that the path of
life which leads one nation to eternal bliss may seem to the
next the very descent into the pit. In noticing among
savage and barbaric peoples the qualifications which deter-
mine future happiness, we may with some distinctness
define these as being excellence, valour, social rank, re-
ligious ordinance. On the whole, however, in the religions
of the lower range of culture, unless where they may have
been affected by contact with higher religions, the destiny
of the man after death seems hardly to turn on judicial
reward or punishment for his moral conduct in life. Such
difference as is made between the future conditions of
different classes of souls, seems more often to belong to a
remarkable intermediate doctrine, standing between the
earlier continuance-theory and the later retribution-theory.
The idea of the next life being similar to this seems to have
developed into the idea that what gives prosperity and re-
nown here will give it also there, so that earthly conditions
carry on their contrasts into the changed world after death.
Thus a man's condition after death will be a result of,
rather than a compensation or retribution for, his condition
during life. A comparison of doctrines held at various
stages of culture may justify a tentative speculation as to
their actual sequence in history, favouring the opinion that

1. c., p. 135. A Wolof proverb is ' The more powerful one is in this world,
the more servile one will be in the next.' (Burton, ' Wit and Wisdom/
p. 28.)

INTERMEDIATE THEORY. 85

through such an intermediate stage the doctrine of simple
future existence was actually developed into the doctrine of
future reward and punishment, a transition which for deep
import to human life has scarcely its rival in the history of
religion.

The effect of earthly rank on the future life, as looked at
by the lower races, brings out this intermediate stage in
bold relief. Mere transfer from one life to another makes
chiefs and slaves here chiefs and slaves hereafter, and this
natural doctrine is very usual. But there are cases in
which earthly caste is exaggerated into utter difference in
the life to come. The aerial paradise of Raiatea, with its
fragrant ever-blooming flowers, its throngs of youths and
girls all perfection, its luxurious feasts and merrymakings,
were for the privileged orders of Areois and chiefs who
could pay the priests their heavy charges, but hardly for the
common populace. This idea reached its height in the
Tonga islands, where aristocratic souls would pass to take
their earthly rank and station in the island paradise of
Bolotu, while plebeian souls, if indeed they existed, would
die with the plebeian bodies they dwelt in. 1 In Vancouver's
Island, the Ahts fancied Quawteaht's calm sunny plenteous
land in the sky as the resting-place of high chiefs, who live
in one great house as the Creator's guests, while the slain
in battle have another to themselves. But otherwise all
Indians of low degree go deep down under the earth to the
land of Chay-her, with its poor houses and no salmon and
small deer, and blankets so small and thin that when the
dead are buried the friends often bury blankets with them,
to send them to the world below with the departed soul. 1
The expectation of royal dignity in the life after death, dis-
tinct from the fate of ordinary mortals, comes well into view
among the Natchez of Louisiana, where the sun-descended
royal family would in some way return to the Sun ; thus

1 Ellis, ' Polyn. Res.' vol. i. pp. 245, 397 ; see also Turner, ' Polynesia,'
p. 237 (Samoans) ; Mariner, ' Tonga Is.' vol. ii. p. 105.
* Sproat, ' Savage Life,' p. 209.

86 ANIMISM.

also in the mightier empire of Peru, where each sun-
descended Inca, feeling the approach of death, announce(
to his assembled vassals that he was called to heaven to rest
with his father the Sun. 1 But in the higher religions, the
change in this respect from the doctrine of continuance to
the doctrine of retribution is wonderful in its completeness.
The story of that great lady who strengthened her hopes of
future happiness by the assurance, ' They will think twice
before they refuse a person of my condition,' is a mere jest
to modern ears. Yet, like many other modern jest, it is
only an archaism which in an older stage of culture had in
it nothing ridiculous.

To the happy land of Torngarsuk the Great Spirit, says
Cranz, only such Greenlanders came as have been valiant
workers, for other ideas of virtue they have none ; such as
have done great deeds, taken many whales and seals, borne
much hardship, been drowned at sea, or died in childbirth. 1
Thus Charlevoix says of the Indians further south, that
their claim to hunt after death on the prairies of eternal
spring is to have been good hunters and warriors here.
Lescarbot, speaking of the belief among the Indians of
Virginia that after death the good will be at rest and the
wicked in pain, remarks that their enemies are the wicked
and themselves the good, so that in their opinion they are
after death much at their ease, and principally when they
have well defended their country and slain their enemies. 8
So Jean de Lery said of the rude Tubinambas of Brazil,
they they think the souls of such as have lived virtuously,
that is to say, who have well avenged themselves and eaten
many of their enemies, will go behind the great mountains
and dance in beautiful gardens with the souls of their
fathers, but the souls of the effeminate and worthless, who

1 ' Rec. des Voy. au Nord,** vol. v. p. 23 (Natchez) ; Garcilaso de la Vega,
' Commentaries Reales,' lib. i. c. 23, tr. by C. R. Markham ; Prescott,
' Peru,' vol. i. pp. 29, 83 ; J. G. Miiller, p. 402, &c.

1 Cranz, Gronland,' p. 259.

3 Charlevoix, ' Nouvelle France,' vol. vi. p. 77 ; Lescarbot, ' Hist, de la
Nouvelle France,' Paris, 1619, p. 679.

INTERMEDIATE THEORY. 87

have not striven to defend their country, will go to Aygnan
the Evil Spirit, to incessant torments. 1 More characteristic
and probably more genuinely native than most of these
expectations, is that of the Caribs, that the braves of their
nation should go after death to happy islands, where all
good fruits grow wild, there to spend their time in dancing
and feasting, and to have their enemies the Arawaks for
slaves ; but the cowards who feared to go to war should go
to serve the Arawaks, dwelling in their waste and barren
lands beyond the mountains. 2

The fate of warriors slain in battle is the subject of two
singularly contrasted theories. We have elsewhere ex-
amined the deep-lying belief that if a man's body be
wounded or mutilated, his soul will arrive in the same state
in the other world. Perhaps it is some such idea of the
soul being injured with the body by a violent death, that
leads the Mintira of the Malay Peninsula, though not
believing in a future reward and punishment, to exclude
from the happy paradise of ' Fruit Island ' (Pulo Bua) the
souls of such as die a bloody death, condemning them to
dwell on ' Red Land ' (Tana Mera), a desolate barren
place, whence they must even go to the fortunate island to
fetch their food. 3 In North America, the idea is mentioned
among the Hurons that the souls of the slain in war live in
a band apart, neither they nor suicides being admitted to
the spirit-villages of their tribe. A belief ascribed to certain
Indians of California may be cited here, though less as a
sample of real native doctrine than to illustrate that borrow-
ing of Christian ideas which so often spoils such evidence
for ethnological purposes. They held, it is said, that
Niparaya, the Great Spirit, hates war, and will have no
warriors in his paradise, but that his adversary Wac, shut
up for rebellion in a great cave, takes thither to himself the

Lery, ' Hist, d'un Voy. en Bre"sil,' p. 234 ; Coreal, ' Voi. aux Indes Occ.'
i. p. 224.

Rochefort, ' lies Antilles,' p. 430.
' Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. i. p. 325.

88 ANIMISM.

slain in battle. 1 On the other hand, the thought which shows
out in such bold relief in the savage mind, that courage is
virtue, and battle and bloodshed the hero's noblest pursuit,
leads naturally to a hope of glory for his soul when his
body has been slain in fight. Such expectation was not
strange in North America, to that Indian tribe, for instance,
who talked of the Great Spirit walking in the moonlight on
his island in Lake Superior, whither slain warriors will go
to him to take their pleasure in the chace. 2 The Nicara-
guans declared that men who died in their houses went
underground, but the slain in war went to serve the gods in
the east, where the sun comes from. This corresponds in
part with a remarkable threefold contrast of the future
life among their Aztec kinsfolk. Mictlan, the Hades of the
general dead, and Tlalocan, the Earthly Paradise, reached
by certain special and acute ways of death, have been
mentioned here already. But the souls of warriors slain in
battle or sacrificed as captives, and of women who died in
child-birth, were transported to the heavenly plains ; there
the heroes, peeping through the holes in their buck'srs
pierced by arrows in earthly fight, watched the Sun arise and
saluted him with shout and clash of arms, and at noon the
mothers received him with music and dance to escort him
on his western way. 8 In such wise, to the old Norseman,
to die the ' straw-death ' of sickness or old age was to go
down into the dismal loathly house of Hela the Death-
goddess ; if the warrior's fate on the field of battle were
denied him, and death came to fetch him from a peaceful
couch, yet at least he could have the scratch of the spear,
Odin's mark, and so contrive to go with a blood-stained
soul to the glorious Walhalla. Surely then if ever, says a

1 Brebeuf in ' Rel. des Je"s.' 1636, p. 104 ; see also Meiners, vol. ii. p. 769 ;
J. G. Miiller, pp. 89, 139.

* Chateaubriand, ' Voy. en Ame'riquc ' (Religion).

1 Oviedo, ' Nicaragua,' p. 22 ; Torquemada, ' Monarquia Indiana,' book
xiii. c. 48 ; Sahagun, book iii. app. ch. i.-iii. in Kingsborough, vol. vii.
Compare Anderson, ' Exp. to W. Yunnan,' p. 125. (Shans, good men and
mothers dying in child-birth to heaven, bad men and those killed by the
sword to hell.)

INTERMEDIATE THEORY. 89

modern writer, the kingdom of heaven suffered violence,
and the violent took it by force. 1 Thence we follow the
idea onward to the battle-fields of holy war, where the
soldier earned with his blood the unfading crown of martyr-
dom, and Christian and Moslem were urged in mutual onset
and upheld in agony by the glimpse of paradise opening to
receive the slayer of the infidel.

Such ideas, current among the lower races as to the
soul's future happiness or misery, do not seem, setting
aside some exceptional points, to be thoughts adopted or
degraded from doctrines of cultured nations. They rather
belong to the intellectual stratum in which they are found.
If so, we must neither ignore nor exaggerate their standing
in the lower ethics. ' The good are good warriors and
hunters,' said a Pawnee chief ; whereupon the author who
mentions the saying remarks that this would also be the
opinion of a wolf, if he could express it. 2 Nevertheless,
if experience has led societies of savage men to fix on
certain qualities, such as courage, skill, and industry, as
being virtues, then many moralists will say that such a
theory is not only ethical, but lying at the very foundation
of ethics. And if these savage societies further conclude
that such virtues obtain their reward in another world
as in this, then their theories of future happiness and
misery, destined for what they call good and bad men, may
be looked on in this sense as belonging to morality,
though at no high stage of development. But many or
most writers, when they mention morality, assume a
narrower definition of it. This must be borne in mind in
appreciating what is meant by the statements of several
well-qualified ethnologists, who have, in more or less degree,
denied a moral character to the future retribution as con-
ceived in savage religion. Mr. Ellis, describing the Society
Islanders, at least gives an explicit definition.. When he
tried to ascertain whether they connected a person's con-

1 Alger, ' Future Life,' p. 93.

2 Brinton, ' Myths of New World,' p. 300.

II. G

90 ANIMISM.

dition in a future state with his disposition and conduct in
this, he never could learn that they expected in the world
of spirits any difference in the treatment of a kind, gene-
rous, peaceful man, and that of a cruel, parsimonious,
quarrelsome one. 1 This remark, it seems to me, applies to
savage religion far and wide. Dr. Brinton, commenting on
the native religions of America, draws his line in a some-
what different place. Nowhere, he says, was any well-
defined doctrine that moral turpitude was judged and
punished in the next world. No contrast is discoverable
between a place of torments and a realm of joy ; at the
worst but a negative castigation awaited the liar, the coward,
or the niggard. 2 Professor J. G. Muller, in his ' American
Religions,' yet more pointedly denies any ' ethical meaning '
in the contrasts of the savage future life, and looks upon
what he well calls its 'light-side' and 'shadow-side' not
as recompensing earthly virtue and vice, but rather as
carrying on earthly conditions in a new existence. 3

The idea that admission to the happier region depends
on the performance of religious rites and the giving of
offerings, seems scarcely known to the lowest savages. It
is worth while, however, to notice some statements which
seem to mark its appearance at the level of high savagery
or low barbarism. Thus in the Society Islands, though
the destiny of man's spirit to the region of night or to
elysium. was irrespective of moral character, we hear of
neglect of rites and offerings as being visited by the dis-
pleasure of deities. 4 In Florida, the belief of the Sun-
worshipping people of Achalaque was thus described : those
who had lived well, and well served the Sun, and given
many gifts to the poor in his honour, would be happy after

1 Ellis, ' Polyn. Res.' vol. i. p. 397 ; see also Williams, ' Fiji,' vol. i.

P- 243-

2 Brinton, p. 242, &c.

8 J. G. Muller, ' Amer. Urrel.' pp. 87, 224. See also the opinions of
Meiners, ' Gesch. der Religion,' vol. ii. p. 768 ; Wuttke, ' Gesch. des Heiden-
thums,' vol. i. p. 115.

4 Ellis, 1. c. ; Moerenhout, ' Voyage,' vol. i. p. 433.

RETRIBUTION THEORY. 91

death and be changed into stars, whereas the wicked would
be carried to a destitute and wretched existence among
mountain precipices, where fierce wild beasts have their
dens. 1 According to Bosman, the souls of Guinea negroes
reaching the river of death must answer to the divine judge
how they have lived ; have they religiously observed the
holy days dedicated to their god, have they abstained from
all forbidden meats and kept their vows inviolate, they are
wafted across to paradise ; but if they have sinned against
these laws they are plunged in the river and there drowned
for ever. 2 Such statements among peoples at these stages
of culture are not frequent, and perhaps not very valid as
accounts of original native doctrine. It is in the elaborate
religious systems of more organized nations, in modern
Brahmanism and Buddhism, and degraded forms of Chris-
tianity, that the special adaptation of the doctrine of re-
tribution to the purposes of priestcraft and ceremonialism
has become a commonplace of missionary reports.

It is well not to speak too positively on a subject so
difficult and doubtful as this of the history of the belief in
future retribution. Careful criticism of the evidence is
above all necessary. For instance, we have to deal with
several statements recorded among low races, explicitly
assigning reward or punishment to men after death, accord-
ing as they were good or bad in life. Here the first thing
to be done is to clear up, if possible, the question whether
the doctrine of retribution may have been borrowed from
some more cultured neighbouring religion, as the very details
often show to have been the case. Examples of direct
adoption of foreign dogmas on this subject are not un-
common in the world. When among the Dayaks of Borneo
it is said that a dead man becomes a spirit and lives in the
jungle, or haunts the place of burial or burning, or when
some distant mountain-top is pointed to as the abode of
spirits of departed friends, it is hardly needful to question

1 Rochefort, ' lies Antilles,' p. 378.

2 Bosman, ' Guinea,' letter x. ; in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 401.

92 ANIMISM.

the originality of ideas so characteristically savage. But
one of these Dayak tribes, burning the dead, says that ' as
the smoke of the funeral pile of a good man rises, the soul
ascends with it to the sky, and that the smoke from the
pile of a wicked man descends, and his soul with it is borne
down to the earth, and through it to the regions below.' 1
Did not this exceptional idea come into the Dayak's mind
by contact with Hinduisn- ? In Orissa, again, Khond souls
have to leap across the black unfathomable river to gain a
footing on the slippery Leaping Rock, where Dinga Pennu,
the judge of the dead, sits writing his register of all men's
daily lives and actions, sending virtuous souls to become
blessed spirits, keeping back wicked ones and sending them
to suffer their penalties in new births on earth.* Here the
striking myth of the leaping rock is perfectly savage, but
the ideas of a judgment, moral retribution, and transmigra-
tion, may have come from the Hindus of the plains, as the
accompanying notion of the written book unquestionably
did. Dr. Mason is no doubt right in taking as the indi-
genous doctrine of the Karens their notion of an under-
world where the ghosts of the dead live on as here, while
he sets down to Hindu influence the idea of Tha-ma, the
judge of the dead (the Hindu Yama), as allotting their fate
according to their lives, sending those who have done deeds
of merit to heaven, those who have done wickedness to hell,
and keeping in Hades the neither good nor bad. 3 How the
theory of moral retribution may be superposed on more
primitive doctrines of the future life, comes remarkably into
view in Turanian religion. Among the Lapps, Jabme-Aimo,
the subterranean ' home of the dead ' below the earth,
where the departed have their cattle and follow their liveli-
hood like Lapps above, though they are richer, wiser,

1 St. John, 'Far East,' vol. i. p. 181 ; see Mundy, 'Narrative,' vol. i.
P- 332-

2 Macpherson, p. 92. Compare Moerenhout, 1. c. (Tahiti).

3 Mason, 1. c. p. 195. See also De Brasses, ' Nav. aux Terres Aust rales,'
vol. ii. p. 482 (Caroline Is.).

RETRIBUTION THEORY. 93

stronger folk, and also Saivo-Aimo, a yet happier ' home of
the gods,' are conceptions thoroughly in the spirit of the
lower culture. But in one account the subterranean abode
becomes a place of transition, where the dead stay awhile,
and then with bodies renewed are taken up to the Heaven-
god, or if misdoers, are flung into the abyss. Castren is
evidently right in rejecting this doctrine as not native, but
due to Catholic influence. So, at the end of the i6th Rune
of the Finnish Kalewala, which tells of Wainamoinen's visit
to the dismal land of the dead, there is put into the hero's,
mouth a second speech, warning the children of men to
harm not the innocent, for sad payment is in Tuoni's dwell-
ing the bed of evil-doers is there, with its glowing red-hot
stones below and its canopy of snakes above. But the same
critic condemns this moral ' tag/ as a later addition to the
genuine heathen picture of Manala, the under-world of the
dead. 1 Nor did Christianity scorn to borrow details from
the religions it abolished. The narrative of a mediaeval
visit to the other world would be incomplete without its
description of the awful Bridge of Death ; Achercn and
Charon's bark were restored to their places in Tartarus by
the visionary and the poet ; the wailing of sinful souls
might be heard as they were hammered white-hot in Vulcan's
smithies ; and the weighing of good and wicked souls, as we
may see it figured on every Egyptian mummy-case, now
passed into the charge of St. Paul and the Devil. 8

The foregoing considerations having been duly weighed,
it remains to call attention to the final problem, at what
state of religious history the full theological doctrine of
judicial retribution and moral compensation in a future life
may have arisen. It is hard, however, to define where this
development takes place even at a barbaric stage of culture.
Thus among the barbaric nations of West Africa, there

1 Castrfn, 'Finn. Myth.' pp. 136, 144. See Georgi, ' Reise im Russ.
Reich,' vol. i. p. 278. Compare accounts of Purgatory among the North
American Indians, apparently derived from missionaries, in Morgan, ' Iro-
quois,' p. 169 ; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 345.

See T. Wright, ' St. Patrick's Purgatory.'

94 ANIMISM.

appear such beliefs as that in Nuffi, that criminals who
escape their punishment here will receive it in the other
world ; the division of the Yoruba under-world into an
upper and a lower region for the righteous and wicked ; the
Km doctrine that only the good will rejoin their ancestors
in heaven ; the Oji doctrine that only the good will dwell
after death in the heavenly house or city of the Deity whom
they call the ' Highest.' 1 How far is all this to be taken
as native conception, and how far as due to ages of Christian
and Moslem intercourse, to which at any rate few will
scruple to refer the last case ?

In the lower ranges of civilization, some of the most re-
markable doctrines of this class are recorded in North
America. Thus they appear in connexion with the fancy
of a river or gulf to be passed by the departing soul on its
way to the land of the dead, one of the most remarkable
traits of the mythology of the world. This seems in its
origin a nature-myth, connected probably with the Sun's
passage across the sea into Hades, and in many of its
versions it appears as a mere episode of the soul's journey
without any moral sense attached to it. Brebeuf, the same
early Jesuit missionary who says explicitly of the Hurons
that there is no difference in their future life between the
fate of the virtuous and the vicious, mentions also among
them the tree-trunk that bridges the river of death ; here
the dead must cross, the dog that guards it attacks some
souls, and they fall. Yet in other versions this myth has a
moral sense attached to it, and the passage of the heaven-
gulf becomes an ordeal to separate good and wicked. To
take but one instance, there is Catlin's account of the
Choctaw souls journeying far westward, to whom the long
slippery barkless pine-log, stretching from hill to hill,
bridges over the deep and dreadful river ; the good pass
safely to a beauteous Indian paradise, the wicked fall into
the abyss of waters, and go the dark hungry wretched

1 Waitz, vol. ii. pp. 171, 191 ; Bow en, ' Yoruba Lang.' p. xvi. See J. L.
Wilson, p. 210.

RETRIBUTION THEORY. 95

land where they are henceforth to dwell. 1 This and many
similar beliefs current in the religions of the world, which
need not be particularised here, seem best explained as
originally nature-myths, afterwards adapted to a religious
purpose. A different conception was recorded so early as
1623, by Captain John Smith among the Massachusetts,
whose name is still borne by the New England district they
once inhabited : They say, at first there was no king but
Kiehtan, that dwelleth far westerly above the heavens,
whither all good men go when they die, and have plenty of
all things. The bad men go thither also and knock at the
door, but he bids them go wander in endless want and
misery, for they shall not stay there. 2 Lastly, the Salish
Indians of Oregon say that the good go to a happy hunting-
ground of endless game, while the bad go to a place where
there is eternal snow, hunger, and thirst, and are tantalised
by the sight of game they cannot kill, and water they can-
not drink. 3 If, now, in looking at these records, the doubts
which beset them can be put aside, and the accounts of the
different fates assigned to the good and wicked can be
accepted as belonging to genuine native American religion
and if, moreover, it be considered that the goodness and
wickedness for which men are to be ihus rewarded and
punished are moral qualities, however undeveloped in de-
finition, this will amount to an admission that the doctrine
of moral retribution at any rate appears within the range of
savage theology. Such a view, however, by no means invali-
dates the view here put forward as to the historical develop-
ment of the doctrine, but only goes to prove at how early
a stage it may have begun to take place. The general mass
of evidence still remains to show the savage doctrine of the
future state, as originally involving no moral retribution,

1 Brebeuf in ' Rcl. des JeV 1635, p. 35 ; 1636, p. 105. Catlin, ' N. A.
Ind.' vol. ii. p. 127; Long's ' Exp.' vol. i. p. 180. Sec Brinton, p. 247;
Waitz, vol. ii. p. 191, vol. iii. p. 197; and the collection of myths of the
Heaven-Bridge and Heaven-Gulf in ' Early History of Mankind,' chap. xii.

2 Smith, ' New England,' in Pinkerton, vol. xiii. p. 244.

3 Wilson in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iii. p. 303.

g6 ANIMISM.

or arriving at this through transitional and rudimentary
stages.

In strong contrast with the schemes of savage future
existence, I need but set before the reader's mind a salient
point here and there in the doctrine of distinct and unques-
tionable moral retribution, as held in religions of the higher
culture. The inner mystic doctrines of ancient Egypt may
perhaps never be extracted now from the pictures and
hieroglyphic formulas of the ' Book of the Dead.' But the
ethnographer may satisfy himself of two important points
as to the place which the Egyptian view of the future life
occupies in the history of religion. On the one hand, the
soul's quitting and revisiting the corpse, the placing of the
image in the tomb, the offering of meat and drink, the
fearful journey to the regions of the departed, the renewed
life like that on earth, with its houses to dwell in and fields
to cultivate all these are conceptions which connect the
Egyptian religion with the religions of the ruder races of
mankind. But on the other hand, the mixed ethical and
ceremonial standard by which the dead are to be judged
adapts these primitive and even savage thoughts to a higher
social development, such as may be shown by fragments
from that remarkable ' negative confession ' which the
dead must make before Osiris and the forty-two judges in
Amenti. ' O ye Lords of Truth ! let me know you !
. . . Rub ye away my faults. I have not privily done
evil against mankind. ... I have not told falsehoods
in the tribunal of Truth. ... I have not done any
wicked thing. I have not made the labouring man do more
than his task daily. ... I have not calumniated the
slave to his master. ... I have not murdered. . . .
I have not done fraud to men. I have not changed
measures of the country. I have not injured the images of
the gods. I have not taken scraps of the bandages of the
dead. I have not committed adultery. I have not with-
held milk from the mouths of sucklings. I have not
hunted wild animals in the pasturages. I have not netted

RETRIBUTION THEORY. 97

sacred birds. ... I am pure ! I am pure ! I am
pure ! ' l

The Vedic hymns, again, tell of endless happiness for
the good in heaven with the gods, and speak also of the
deep pit where the liars, the lawless, they who give no
sacrifice, will be cast. 2 The rival theories of continuance
and retribution are seen in instructive coexistence in classic
Greece and Rome. What seems the older belief holds its
ground in the realm of Hades ; that dim region of bodiless,
smoke-like ghosts remains the home of the undistinguished
crowd in the MTOS /3t'os, the 'middle life.' Yet at the
same time the judgment-seat of Minos and Rhadamanthos,
the joys of Elysium for the just and good, fiery Tartarus
echoing with the wail of the wicked, represent the newer
doctrine of a moral retribution. The idea of purgatorial
suffering, which hardly seems to have entered the minds of
the lower races, expands in immense vigour in the great
Aryan religions of Asia. In Brahmanism and Buddhism,
the working out of good and evil actions into their neces-
sary consequence of happiness and misery is the very key
to the philosophy of life, whether life's successive transmi-
grations be in animal, or human, or demon births on earth,
or in luxurious heaven-palaces of gold and jewels, or in the
agonizing hells where Oriental fancy riots in the hideous
inventory of torture caldrons of boiling oil and liquid fire ;
black dungeons and rivers of filth ; vipers, and vultures,
and cannibals ; thorns, and spears, and red-hot pincers, and
whips of flame. To the modern Hindu, it is true, cere-
monial morality seems to take the upper hand, and the
question of happiness or misery after death turns rather
on ablutions and fasts, on sacrifices and gifts to brah-
mans, than on purity and beneficence of life. Buddhism in
South East Asia, sadly degenerate from its once high

1 Birch, Introduction to and translation of the ' Book of the Dead,' in
Bunsen, vol. v. ; Wilkinson, ' Ancient Eg.' vol. v.

2 For references to Rig Veda see Muir, ' Sanskrit Texts,' sec. xviii. ; Max
Miiller, Lecture on Vedas in ' Essays,' vol. ii.

98 ANIMISM.

estate, is apt to work out the doctrine of merit and de-
merit into debtor and creditor accounts kept in good and
bad marks from day to day ; to serve out so much tea in
hot weather counts I to the merit-side, and putting a
stop to one's women scolding for a month counts i like-
wise, but this may be balanced by the offence of letting
them keep the bowls and plates dirty for a day, which
counts i the wrong way ; and it appears that giving wood
for two coffins, which count 30 marks each, and burying
four bones, at 10 marks a-piece, would just be balanced
by murdering a child, which counts 100 to the bad. 1 It
need hardly be said here that these two great religions of
Asia must be judged rather in their records of long past
ages, than in the lingering degeneration of their modern
reality.

In the Khordah-A vesta, a document of the old Persian
religion, the fate of good and wicked souls at death is pic-
tured in a dialogue between Zarathustra (Zoroaster), and
Ahura-Mazda and Anra-Mainyu (Ormuzd and Ahriman).
Zarathustra asks, ' Ahura-Mazda, Heavenly, Holiest, Creator
of the corporeal world, Pure ! When a pure man dies,
where does his soul dwell during this night ? ' Then
answers Ahura-Mazda : ' Near his head it sits down, re-
citing the Gatha Ustavaiti, praying happiness for itself ;
" Happiness be to the man who conduces to the happiness of
each. May Ahura-Mazda create, ruling after his wish. ' ' ' On
this night the soul sees as much joyfulness as the whole
living world possesses ; and so the second and the third night .
When the lapse of the third night turns itself to light, then
the soul of the pure man goes forward, recollecting itself by
the perfume of plants. A wind blows to meet it from the
mid-day regions, a sweet-scented one, more sweet-scented
than the other winds, and the soul of the pure man receives
it ' Whence blows this wind, the sweetest-scented which I
ever have smelt with the nose ? ' Then comes to meet him

1 ' Journ. Ind. Archip.' new ser. vol. ii. p. 210. See Bastian, ' Oestl.
Asien,' vol. iii. p. 387.

RETRIBUTION THEORY. 99

his own law, (his rule of life) in the figure of a maiden
beautiful, shining, with shining arms, powerful, well-grown,
slender, large-bosomed, with praiseworthy body, noble, with
brilliant face, one of fifteen years, as fair in her growth as
the fairest creatures. Then to her speaks the soul of the
pure man, asking, ' What maiden art thou whom I have
seen here as the fairest of maidens in body ? ' She answers,
' I am, O youth, thy good thoughts, words, and works, thy
good law, the own law of thine own body. Thou hast
made the pleasant yet pleasanter to me, the fair yet fairer,
the desirable yet more desirable, the sitting in a high place
sitting in a yet higher place.' Then the soul of the pure
man takes the first step and comes to the first paradise, the
second and third step to the second and third paradise,
the fourth step and arrives at the Eternal Lights. To the
souls speaks a pure one deceased before, asking it, ' How
art thou, O pure deceased, come away from the fleshly
dwellings, from the corporeal world hither to the invisible,
from the perishable world hither to the imperishable. Hail !
has it happened to thee long ? ' ' Then speaks Ahura-
Mazda : " Ask not him whom thou askest, for he is come
on the fearful way of trembling, the separation of body and
soul. Bring him hither of the food, of the full fatness, that
is the food for a youth who thinks, speaks, and does good,
who is devoted to the good law after death that is the food
for a woman who especially thinks good, speaks good, does
good, the following, obedient, pure after death." And
now Zarathustra asks, when a wicked one dies, where his
soul dwells ? He is told how, running about near the head,
it utters the prayer, Ke maum : ' Which land shall I
praise, whither shall I go praying, O Ahura-Mazda ? '
In this night it sees as much unjoyfulness as the whole
living world ; and so the second and the third night, and it
goes at dawn to the impure place, recollecting itself by the
stench. An evil-smelling wind comes towards the dead from
the north, and with it the ugly hateful maiden who is his
own wicked deeds, and the soul takes the fourth step into

100 ANIMISM.

the darkness without beginning, and a wicked soul asks
how long woe to thee ! art thou come ? and the mocking
Anra-Mainyu, answering in words like the words of Ahura-
Mazda to the good, bids food to be brought poison, and
mixed with poison, for them who think and speak and do
evil, and follow the wicked law. The Parsi of our own
time, following in obscure tradition the ancient Zoroastrian
faith, before he prays for forgiveness for all that he ought
to have thought, and said, and done, and has not, for all
that he ought not to have thought, and said, and dune, and
has, confesses thus his faith of the future life : ' I am
wholly without doubt in the existence of the good Mazada-
yanian faith, in the coming of the resurrection and the
later body, in the stepping over the bridge Chinvat, in an
invariable recompense of good deeds and their reward, and
of bad deeds and their punishment.' l

In Jewish theology, the doctrine of future retribution
appears after the Babylonish captivity, not in ambiguous
terms, but as the strongly-expressed and intensely-felt
religioAis conviction it has since remained among the chil-
dren of Israel. Not long afterward, it received the sanction
of Christianity.

A broad survey of the doctrine of the Future Life among
the various nations of the world shows at once how difficult
and how important is a systematic theory of its develop-
ment. Looked at ethnographically, the general relations
of the lower to the higher culture as to the belief in future
existence may be denned somewhat as follows : If we draw
a line dividing civilization at the junction of savagery and
barbarism about where the Carib and New Zealander ends
?nd the Aztec or Tatar begins, we may see clearly the
difference of prevalent doctrine on either side. On the
savage side, the theory of hovering ghosts is strong, re-
birth in human or animal bodies is often thought of, but
above all there prevails the expectation of a new life, most

1 Spiegel, ' Avesta,' ed. Bleek, vol. iii. pp. 136, 163 ; see vol. i. pp. xviii.
90, 141 ; vol. ii. p. 68.

DEVELOPMENT OF FUTURE LIFE. IOI

often located in some distant earthly region, or less com-
monly in the under-world or on the sky. On the cultured
side, the theory of hovering ghosts continues, but tends to
subside from philosophy into folklore, the theory of re-birth
is elaborated into great philosophic systems, but eventually
dies out under the opposition of scientific biology, while
the doctrine of a new life after death maintains its place
with immense power in the human mind, although the dead
have been ousted by geography from any earthly district,
and the regions of heaven and hell are more and more
spiritualized out of definite locality into vague expressions
of future happiness and misery. Again, on the savage side
we find the dominant idea to be a continuance of the soul
in a new existence, like the present life, or idealized and
exaggerated on its model ; while on the cultured side the
doctrine of judgment and moral retribution prevails with
paramount, though not indeed absolute sway. What, then,
has been the historical course of theological opinion, to
have produced in different stages of culture these contrasted
phases of doctrine ?

In some respects, theories deriving savage from more
civilized ideas are tenable. In certain cases, to consider a
particular savage doctrine of the future state as a fragmen-
tary, or changed, or corrupted outcome of the religion of
higher races, seems as easy as to reverse this view by taking
savagery as representing the starting-point. It is open to
anyone to suppose that the doctrine of transmigration
among American savages and African barbarians may have
been degraded from elaborate systems of metempsychosis
established among philosophic nations like the Hindus ;
that the North American and South African doctrine of
continued existence in a subterranean world may be derived
from similar beliefs held by races at the level of the ancient
Greeks ; that when rude tribes in the Old or New World
assign among the dead a life of happiness to some, and of
misery to others, this idea may have been inherited or
adopted from cultured nations holding more strongly and

102 .. ANIMISM.

systematically the doctrine of retribution. In such cases
the argument is to a great extent the same, whether the
lower race be considered degenerate descendants of a higher
nation, or whether the simpler supposition be put forward
that they have adopted the ideas of some more cultured
people. These views ought to have full attention, for dege-
nerate and borrowed beliefs form no small item in the
opinions of uncivilized races. Yet this kind of explanation
is more adapted to meet special cases than general con-
ditions ; it is rather suited to piecemeal treatment, than to
comprehensive study, of the religions of mankind. Worked
out on a large scale, it would endeavour to account for
the doctrines of the savage world, as being a patchwork of
fragments from various religions of high nations, trans-
ported by not easily-conceived means from their distant
homes and set down in remote regions of the earth. It
may be safely said that no hypothesis can account for the
varied doctrines current among the lower tribes, without the
admission that religious ideas have been in no small mea-
sure developed and modified in the districts where they are
current.

Now this theory of development, in its fullest scope,
combined with an accessory theory of degeneration and
adoption, seems best to meet the general facts of the case.
A hypothesis which finds the origin of the doctrine of the
future life in the primitive animism of the lower races, and
thence traces it along the course of religious thought, in
varied developments fitted to exacter knowledge and forming
part of loftier creeds, may well be maintained as in reason-
able accordance with the evidence. Such a theory, as has
been sufficiently shown in the foregoing chapters, affords a
satisfactory explanation of the occurrence, in the midst of
cultured religions, of intellectually low superstitions, such
as that of offerings to the dead, and various others. These,
which the development theory treats naturally as survivals
from a low stage of education Lingering on in a higher, are
by no means so readily accounted for by the degeneration

DEVELOPMENT OF FUTURE LIFE. IO3

theory. There are more special arguments which favour
the priority of the savage to the civilized phases of the
doctrine of a future life. If savages did in general receive
their views of another existence from the religious systems
of cultured nations, these systems can hardly have been
such as recognize the dominant doctrines of heaven and
hell. For, as to the locality of the future world, savage
races especially favour a view little represented in civilized
belief, namely, that the life to come is in some distant
earthly country. Moreover, the belief in a fiery abyss or
Gehenna, which excites so intensely and lays hold so firmly
of the imagination of the most ignorant men, would have
been especially adapted to the minds of savages, had it
come down to them by tradition from an ancestral faith.
Yet, in fact, the lower races so seldom recognize' such an
idea, that even the few cases in which it occurs lie open to
suspicion of not being purely native. The proposition that
the savage doctrines descend from the more civilized seems
thus to involve the improbable supposition, that tribes
capable of keeping up traditions of Paradise, Heaven, or
Hades, should nevertheless have forgotten or discarded a
tradition of Hell. Still more important is the contrast
between the continuance-theory and the retribution-theory
of the future existence, in the sections of culture where
they respectively predominate. On the one hand, the con-
tinuance-theory, with its ideas of a ghostly life like this, is
directly vouched for by the evidence of the. senses in dreams
and visions of the dead, and may be claimed as part of the
' Natural Religion,' properly so called, of the lower races.
On the other hand, the retribution-theory is a dogma which
this evidence of apparitions could hardly set on foot, though
capable of afterwards supporting it. Throughout the pre-
sent study of animistic religion, it constantly comes into
view that doctrines which in the lower culture are philo-
sophical, tend in the higher to become ethical ; that what
among savages is a science of nature, passes among civilized
nations into a moral engine. Herein lies the distinction

104 ANIMISM.

of deepest import between the two great theories of the
soul's existence after bodily death. According to a develop-
ment theory of culture, the savage, unethical doctrine
of continuance would be taken as the more primitive, suc-
ceeded in higher civilization by the ethical doctrine of
retribution. Now this theory of the course of religion in
the distant and obscure past is conformable with experience
of its actual history, so far as this lies within our know-
ledge. Whether we compare the early Greek with the later
Greek, the early Jew with the later Jew, the ruder races
of the world in their older condition with the same races as
affected by the three missionary religions of Buddhism,
Mohammedanism, Christianity, the testimony of history
vouches for the like transition towards ethical dogma.

In conclusion, though theological argument on the actual
validity of doctrines relating to the future life can have no
place here, it will be well not to pass by without further
remark one great practical question which lies fairly within
the province of Ethnography. How, in the various stages
of culture, has the character and conduct of the living been
affected by the thought of a life to come ? If we take the
savage beliefs as a starting-point, it will appear that these
belong rather to speculative philosophy than to practical rule
of life. The lower races hold opinions as to a future state
because they think them true, but it is not surprising that
men who take so little thought of a contingency three days
off, should receive little practical impulse from vague antici-
pations of a life beyond the grave. Setting aside the con-
sideration of possible races devoid of all thought of a
future existence, there unquestionably has been and is a
great mass of mankind whose lives are scarcely affected by
such expectations of another life as they do hold. The
doctrine of continuance, making death as it were a mere
journey into a new country, can have little direct action on
men's conduct, though indirectly it has indeed an enormous
and disastrous influence on society, leading as it does to the
slaughter of wives and slaves, and the destruction of pro-

INFLUENCE OF FUTURE LIFE. IO5

perty, for the use of the dead in the next world. If this
world to come be thought a happier region, the looking for-
ward to it makes men more willing to risk their lives in
battle, promotes the habit of despatching the sick and aged
into a better life, and encourages suicide when life is very
hateful here. When the half-way house between continuance
and retribution is reached, and the idea prevails that the
manly virtues which give rank and wealth and honour here
will lead hereafter to yet brighter glory, then this belief
must add new force to the earthly motives which make bold
warriors and mighty chiefs. But among men who expect to
become hovering ghosts at death, or to depart to some
gloomy land of shades, such expectation strengthens the
natural horror and hatred of dissolution. They tend to-
ward the state of mind frequent among modern Africans,
whose thought of death is that he shall drink no more rum,
wear no more fine clothes, have no more wives. The negro
of our own day would feel to the utmost the sense of those
lines in the beginning of the Iliad, which describe the heroes'
' souls ' being cast down to Hades, but ' themselves ' left a
prey to dogs and carrion birds.

Rising to the level of the higher races, we mark the
thought of future existence taking a larger and larger place
in the convictions of religion, the expectation of a judg-
ment after death gaining in intensity and becoming, what it
scarcely seems to the savage, a real motive in life. Yet this
change is not to be measured as proceeding throughout in
any direct proportion with the development of culture. The
doctrine of the future life has hardly taken deeper and
stronger root in the higher than in the middle levels of
civilization. In the language of ancient Egypt, it is the
dead who are emphatically called the ' living,' for their life
is everlasting, whether in the world of the departed, or
nearer home in the tomb, the ' eternal dwelling.' The
Moslem says that men sleep in life and wake in death ;
the Hindu likens the body which a soul has quitted to the
bed he rises from in the morning. The story of the ancient

II. H

106 ANIMISM.

Getae, who wept at births and laughed at funerals, embodies
an idea of the relation of this life to the next which comes
to the surface again and again in the history of religion,
nowhere perhaps touched in with a lighter hand than in
the Arabian Nights' tale where Abdallah of the Sea indig-
nantly breaks off his friendship with Abdallah of the Land,
when he hears that the dwellers on the land do not feast and
sing when one of them dies, like the dwellers in the sea,
but mourn and weep and tear their garments. Such thoughts
lead on into the morbid asceticism that culminates in the
life of the Buddhist saint, eating his food with loathing
from the alms-bowl that he carries as though it held
medicine, wrapping himself in grave-clothes from the ceme-
tery, or putting on his disfigured robe as though it were a
bandage to cover a sore, whose looking forward is to death
for deliverance from the misery of life, whose dreamiest
hope is that after an inconceivable series of successive
existences he may find in utter dissolution and not-being a
refuge even from heaven.

The belief in future retribution has been indeed a power-
ful engine in shaping the life of nations. Powerful both for
good and evil, it has been made the servant-of-all-work of
many faiths. Priesthoods have used it unscrupulously for
their professional ends, to gain wealth and power for their
own caste, to stop intellectual and social progress beyond
the barriers of their consecrated systems. On the banks of
the river of death, a band of priests has stood for ages to
bar the passage against all poor souls who cannot satisfy
their demands for ceremonies, and formulas, and fees. This
is the dark side of the picture. On the bright side, as we
study the moral standards of the higher nations, and see
how the hopes and fears of the life to come have been
brought to enforce their teachings, it is plain that through
most widely differing religions the doctrine of future judg-
ment has been made to further goodness and to check
wickedness, according to the shifting rules by which men
have divided right from wrong. The philosophic schools

INFLUENCE OF FUTURE LIFE. I(>7

which from classic times onward have rejected the belief in
a future existence, appear to have come back by a new road
to the very starting-point which perhaps the rudest races of
men never quitted. At least this seems true as regards the
doctrine of future retribution, which is alike absent from
the belief of classes of men at the two extremes of culture.
How far the moral standard of life may have been adjusted
throughout the higher races with reference to a life here-
after, is a problem difficult of solution, so largely do un-
believers in this second life share ethical principles which
have been more or less shaped under its influence. Men
who live for one world or for two, have high motives of
virtue in common ; the noble self-respect which impels them
to the life they feel worthy of them ; the love of goodness
for its own sake and for its immediate results ; and beyond
this, the desire to do good that shall survive the doer, who
will not indeed be in the land of the living to see his work,
but who can yet discount his expectations into some measure
of present satisfaction. Yet he who believes that his thread
of life will be severed once and for ever by the fatal shears,
well knows that he wants a purpose and a joy in life, which
belong to him who looks for a life to come. Few men feel
real contentment in the expectation of vanishing out of con-
scious existence, henceforth, like the great Buddha, to exist
only in their works. To remain incarnate in the memory of
friends is something. A few great spirits may enjoy in the
reverence of future ages a thousand years or so of ' sub-
jective immortality ; ' though as for mankind at large, the
individual's personal interest hardly extends beyond those
who have lived in his time, while his own memory scarce
outlives the third and fourth generation. But over and
above these secular motives, the belief in immortality
extends its powerful influence through life, and culminates
at the last hour, when, setting aside the very evidence of
their senses, the mourners smile through their tears, and
say it is not death but life.

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