Note 4 — Chapter X · The Mother-goddess of China and Japan

The Babylonians believed that if the dead were not fed, their ghosts would prowl through the streets and enter houses, searching for food and water.4 In Polynesia the homeless and desolate ghosts were those of poor people, “who during their residence in the body had no friends and no property”.5 The custom of including food-vessels and drinking-cups in the funerary furniture of prehistoric graves in different countries was no doubt connected with the fear of hunger in the hereafter. The custom was widespread of giving the dead food offerings at regular intervals. Once a year the living held feasts in the burial-grounds, and invited the dead to partake of their share. Among the Hallowe’en beliefs in the British Isles is one that ghosts return home during the year-end festival to attend “the feast of all souls”. The Hebridean custom, which lingered even in the nineteenth century, of placing food and water, or milk, beside a corpse while it lay in a house, and outside the door or at the grave after the burial took place, was no doubt a relic of an ancient custom, based on the haunting belief that the dead were in need of nourishment, if not for all time, at any rate until the journey to the Otherworld was completed.