Chapter XI · ANIMISM.

Religious ideas generally appear among low races of Mankind—Negative statements on this subject frequently misleading and mistaken: many cases uncertain—Minimum definition of Religion—Doctrine of Spiritual Beings, here termed Animism—Animism treated as belonging to Natural Religion—Animism divided into two sections, the philosophy of Souls, and of other Spirits—Doctrine of Souls, its prevalence and definition among the lower races—Definition of Apparitional Soul or Ghost-Soul—It is a theoretical conception of primitive Philosophy, designed to account for phenomena now classed under Biology, especially Life and Death, Health and Disease, Sleep and Dreams, Trance and Visions—Relation of Soul in name and nature to Shadow, Blood, Breath—Division of Plurality of Souls—Soul cause of Life; its restoration to body when supposed absent—Exit of Soul in Trances—Dreams and Visions: theory of exit of dreamer’s or seer’s own soul; theory of visits received by them from other souls—Ghost-Soul seen in Apparitions—Wraiths and Doubles—Soul has form of body; suffers mutilation with it—Voice of Ghost—Soul treated and defined as of Material Substance; this appears to be the original doctrine—Transmission of Souls to service in future life by Funeral Sacrifice of wives, attendants, &c.—Souls of Animals—Their transmission by Funeral Sacrifice—Souls of Plants—Souls of Objects—Their transmission by Funeral Sacrifice—Relation of doctrine of Object-Souls to Epicurean theory of Ideas—Historical development of Doctrine of Souls, from the Ethereal Soul of primitive Biology to the Immaterial Soul of modern Theology.

Are there, or have there been, tribes of men so low in culture as to have no religious conceptions whatever? This is practically the question of the universality of religion, which for so many centuries has been affirmed and denied, with a confidence in striking contrast to the imperfect evidence on which both affirmation and denial have been based. Ethnographers, if looking to a theory of development to explain civilization, and regarding its successive 418stages as arising one from another, would receive with peculiar interest accounts of tribes devoid of all religion. Here, they would naturally say, are men who have no religion because their forefathers had none, men who represent a præ-religious condition of the human race, out of which in the course of time religious conditions have arisen. It does not, however, seem advisable to start from this ground in an investigation of religious development. Though the theoretical niche is ready and convenient, the actual statue to fill it is not forthcoming. The case is in some degree similar to that of the tribes asserted to exist without language or without the use of fire; nothing in the nature of things seems to forbid the possibility of such existence, but as a matter of fact the tribes are not found. Thus the assertion that rude non-religious tribes have been known in actual existence, though in theory possible, and perhaps in fact true, does not at present rest on that sufficient proof which, for an exceptional state of things, we are entitled to demand.

It is not unusual for the very writer who declares in general terms the absence of religious phenomena among some savage people, himself to give evidence that shows his expressions to be misleading. Thus Dr. Lang not only declares that the aborigines of Australia have no idea of a supreme divinity, creator, and judge, no object of worship, no idol, temple, or sacrifice, but that ‘in short, they have nothing whatever of the character of religion, or of religious observance, to distinguish them from the beasts that perish.’ More than one writer has since made use of this telling statement, but without referring to certain details which occur in the very same book. From these it appears that a disease like small-pox, which sometimes attacks the natives, is ascribed by them ‘to the influence of Budyah, an evil spirit who delights in mischief;’ that when the natives rob a wild bees’ hive, they generally leave a little of the honey for Buddai; that at certain biennial gatherings of the Queensland tribes, young girls are slain in sacrifice 419to propitiate some evil divinity; and that, lastly, according to the evidence of the Rev. W. Ridley, ‘whenever he has conversed with the aborigines, he found them to have definite traditions concerning supernatural beings—Baiame, whose voice they hear in thunder, and who made all things, Turramullum the chief of demons, who is the author of disease, mischief, and wisdom, and appears in the form of a serpent at their great assemblies, &c.’^[607] By the concurring testimony of a crowd of observers, it is known that the natives of Australia were at their discovery, and have since remained, a race with minds saturated with the most vivid belief in souls, demons, and deities. In Africa, Mr. Moffat’s declaration as to the Bechuanas is scarcely less surprising—that ‘man’s immortality was never heard of among that people,’ he having remarked in the sentence next before, that the word for the shades or manes of the dead is ‘liriti.’^[608] In South America, again, Don Felix de Azara comments on the positive falsity of the ecclesiastics’ assertion that the native tribes have a religion. He simply declares that they have none; nevertheless in the course of his work he mentions such facts as that the Payaguas bury arms and clothing with their dead and have some notions of a future life, and that the Guanas believe in a Being who rewards good and punishes evil. In fact, this author’s reckless denial of religion and law to the lower races of this region justifies D’Orbigny’s sharp criticism, that, ‘this is indeed what he says of all the nations he describes, while actually proving the contrary of his thesis by the very facts he alleges in its support.’^[609]

Such cases show how deceptive are judgments to which breadth and generality are given by the use of wide words in narrow senses. Lang, Moffat, and Azara are authors to whom ethnography owes much valuable knowledge of the tribes 420they visited, but they seem hardly to have recognized anything short of the organized and established theology of the higher races as being religion at all. They attribute irreligion to tribes whose doctrines are unlike theirs, in much the same manner as theologians have so often attributed atheism to those whose deities differed from their own, from the time when the ancient invading Aryans described the aboriginal tribes of India as adeva, i.e. ‘godless,’ and the Greeks fixed the corresponding term ἄθεοι on the early Christians as unbelievers in the classic gods, to the comparatively modern ages when disbelievers in witchcraft and apostolical succession were denounced as atheists; and down to our own day, when controversialists are apt to infer, as in past centuries, that naturalists who support a theory of development of species therefore necessarily hold atheistic opinions.^[610] These are in fact but examples of a general perversion of judgment in theological matters, among the results of which is a popular misconception of the religions of the lower races, simply amazing to students who have reached a higher point of view. Some missionaries, no doubt, thoroughly understand the minds of the savages they have to deal with, and indeed it is from men like Cranz, Dobrizhoffer, Charlevoix, Ellis, Hardy, Callaway, J. L. Wilson, T. Williams, that we have obtained our best knowledge of the lower phases of religious belief. But for the most part the ‘religious world’ is so occupied in hating and despising the beliefs of the heathen whose vast regions of the globe are painted black on the missionary maps, that they have little time or capacity left to understand them. It cannot be so with those who fairly seek to comprehend the nature and meaning of the lower phases of religion. These, while fully alive to the absurdities believed and the horrors perpetrated in its name, will yet 421regard with kindly interest all record of men’s earnest seeking after truth with such light as they could find. Such students will look for meaning, however crude and childish, at the root of doctrines often most dark to the believers who accept them most zealously; they will search for the reasonable thought which once gave life to observances now become in seeming or reality the most abject and superstitious folly. The reward of these enquirers will be a more rational comprehension of the faiths in whose midst they dwell, for no more can he who understands but one religion understand even that religion, than the man who knows but one language can understand that language. No religion of mankind lies in utter isolation from the rest, and the thoughts and principles of modern Christianity are attached to intellectual clues which run back through far præ-Christian ages to the very origin of human civilization, perhaps even of human existence.

While observers who have had fair opportunities of studying the religion of savages have thus sometimes done scant justice to the facts before their eyes, the hasty denials of others who have judged without even facts can carry no great weight. A 16th-century traveller gave an account of the natives of Florida which is typical of such: ‘Touching the religion of this people, which wee have found, for want of their language wee could not understand neither by signs nor gesture that they had any religion or lawe at all.... We suppose that they have no religion at all, and that they live at their own libertie.’^[611] Better knowledge of these Floridans nevertheless showed that they had a religion, and better knowledge has reversed many another hasty assertion to the same effect; as when writers used to declare that the natives of Madagascar had no idea of a future state, and no word for soul or spirit;^[612] or when Dampier enquired after the religion of the natives of Timor, and was told 422that they had none;^[613] or when Sir Thomas Roe landed in Saldanha Bay on his way to the court of the Great Mogul, and remarked of the Hottentots that ‘they have left off their custom of stealing, but know no God or religion.’^[614] Among the numerous accounts collected by Lord Avebury as evidence bearing on the absence or low development of religion among low races,^[615] some may be selected as lying open to criticism from this point of view. Thus the statement that the Samoan Islanders had no religion cannot stand, in face of the elaborate description by the Rev. G. Turner of the Samoan religion itself; and the assertion that the Tupinambas of Brazil had no religion is one not to be received on merely negative evidence, for the religious doctrines and practices of the Tupi race have been recorded by Lery, De Laet, and other writers. Even with much time and care and knowledge of language, it is not always easy to elicit from savages the details of their theology. They try to hide from the prying and contemptuous foreigner their worship of gods who seem to shrink, like their worshippers, before the white man and his mightier Deity. Mr. Sproat’s experience in Vancouver’s Island is an apt example of this state of things. He says: ‘I was two years among the Ahts, with my mind constantly directed towards the subject of their religious beliefs, before I could discover that they possessed any ideas as to an overruling power or a future state of existence. The traders on the coast, and other persons well acquainted with the people, told me that they had no such ideas, and this opinion was confirmed by conversation with many of the less intelligent savages; but at last I succeeded in getting a satisfactory clue.’^[616] It then appeared that the Ahts had all the time been hiding a whole characteristic system of religious doctrines as to souls and their migrations, the 423spirits who do good and ill to men, and the great gods above all. Thus, even where no positive proof of religious ideas among any particular tribe has reached us, we should distrust its denial by observers whose acquaintance with the tribe in question has not been intimate as well as kindly. It is said of the Andaman Islanders that they have not the rudest elements of a religious faith; yet it appears that the natives did not even display to the foreigners the rude music which they actually possessed, so that they could scarcely have been expected to be communicative as to their theology, if they had any.^[617] In our time the most striking negation of the religion of savage tribes is that published by Sir Samuel Baker, in a paper read in 1866 before the Ethnological Society of London, as follows: ‘The most northern tribes of the White Nile are the Dinkas, Shillooks, Nuehr, Kytch, Bohr, Aliab, and Shir. A general description will suffice for the whole, excepting the Kytch. Without any exception, they are without a belief in a Supreme Being, neither have they any form of worship or idolatry; nor is the darkness of their minds enlightened by even a ray of superstition.’ Had this distinguished explorer spoken only of the Latukas, or of other tribes hardly known to ethnographers except through his own intercourse with them, his denial of any religious consciousness to them would have been at least entitled to stand as the best procurable account, until more intimate communication should prove or disprove it. But in speaking thus of comparatively well known tribes such as the Dinkas, Shilluks and Nuehr, Sir S. Baker ignores the existence of published evidence, such as describes the sacrifices of the Dinkas, their belief in good and evil spirits (adjok and djyok), their good deity and heaven-dwelling creator, Dendid, as likewise Néar the Deity of the Nuehr, and the Shilluk’s creator, who is described as visiting, like other spirits, a sacred wood or tree. Kaufmann, Brun-Rollet, 424Lejean, and other observers, had thus placed on record details of the religion of these White Nile tribes, years before Sir S. Baker’s rash denial that they had any religion at all.^[618]

The first requisite in a systematic study of the religions of the lower races, is to lay down a rudimentary definition of religion. By requiring in this definition the belief in a supreme deity or of judgment after death, the adoration of idols or the practice of sacrifice, or other partially-diffused doctrines or rites, no doubt many tribes may be excluded from the category of religious. But such narrow definition has the fault of identifying religion rather with particular developments than with the deeper motive which underlies them. It seems best to fall back at once on this essential source, and simply to claim, as a minimum definition of Religion, the belief in Spiritual Beings. If this standard be applied to the descriptions of low races as to religion, the following results will appear. It cannot be positively asserted that every existing tribe recognizes the belief in spiritual beings, for the native condition of a considerable number is obscure in this respect, and from the rapid change or extinction they are undergoing, may ever remain so. It would be yet more unwarranted to set down every tribe mentioned in history, or known to us by the discovery of antiquarian relics, as necessarily having passed the defined minimum of religion. Greater still would be the unwisdom of declaring such a rudimentary belief natural or instinctive in all human tribes of all times; for no evidence 425justifies the opinion that man, known to be capable of so vast an intellectual development, cannot have emerged from a non-religious condition, previous to that religious condition in which he happens at present to come with sufficient clearness within our range of knowledge. It is desirable, however, to take our basis of enquiry in observation rather than from speculation. Here, so far as I can judge from the immense mass of accessible evidence, we have to admit that the belief in spiritual beings appears among all low races with whom we have attained to thoroughly intimate acquaintance; whereas the assertion of absence of such belief must apply either to ancient tribes, or to more or less imperfectly described modern ones. The exact bearing of this state of things on the problem of the origin of religion may be thus briefly stated. Were it distinctly proved that non-religious savages exist or have existed, these might be at least plausibly claimed as representatives of the condition of Man before he arrived at the religious state of culture. It is not desirable, however, that this argument should be put forward, for the asserted existence of the non-religious tribes in question rests, as we have seen, on evidence often mistaken and never conclusive. The argument for the natural evolution of religious ideas among mankind is not invalidated by the rejection of an ally too weak at present to give effectual help. Non-religious tribes may not exist in our day, but the fact bears no more decisively on the development of religion, than the impossibility of finding a modern English village without scissors or books or lucifer-matches bears on the fact that there was a time when no such things existed in the land.

I propose here, under the name of Animism, to investigate the deep-lying doctrine of Spiritual Beings, which embodies the very essence of Spiritualistic as opposed to Materialistic philosophy. Animism is not a new technical term, though now seldom used.^[619] From its special relation to the doctrine 426of the soul, it will be seen to have a peculiar appropriateness to the view here taken of the mode in which theological ideas have been developed among mankind. The word Spiritualism, though it may be, and sometimes is, used in a general sense, has this obvious defect to us, that it has become the designation of a particular modern sect, who indeed hold extreme spiritualistic views, but cannot be taken as typical representatives of these views in the world at large. The sense of Spiritualism in its wider acceptation, the general belief in spiritual beings, is here given to Animism.

Animism characterizes tribes very low in the scale of humanity, and thence ascends, deeply modified in its transmission, but from first to last preserving an unbroken continuity, into the midst of high modern culture. Doctrines adverse to it, so largely held by individuals or schools, are usually due not to early lowness of civilization, but to later changes in the intellectual course, to divergence from, or rejection of, ancestral faiths; and such newer developments do not affect the present enquiry as to the fundamental religious condition of mankind. Animism is, in fact, the groundwork of the Philosophy of Religion, from that of savages up to that of civilized men. And although it may at first sight seem to afford but a bare and meagre definition of a minimum of religion, it will be found practically sufficient; for where the root is, the branches will generally be produced. It is habitually found that the theory of Animism divides into two great dogmas, forming parts of one consistent doctrine; first, concerning souls of individual creatures, capable of continued existence after the death or destruction of the body; second, concerning other spirits, upward to the rank of powerful deities. Spiritual beings are held to affect or control the events of the material world, and man’s life here and hereafter; and it being considered 427that they hold intercourse with men, and receive pleasure or displeasure from human actions, the belief in their existence leads naturally, and it might almost be said inevitably, sooner or later to active reverence and propitiation. Thus Animism in its full development, includes the belief in souls and in a future state, in controlling deities and subordinate spirits, these doctrines practically resulting in some kind of active worship. One great element of religion, that moral element which among the higher nations forms its most vital part, is indeed little represented in the religion of the lower races. It is not that these races have no moral sense or no moral standard, for both are strongly marked among them, if not in formal precept, at least in that traditional consensus of society which we call public opinion, according to which certain actions are held to be good or bad, right or wrong. It is that the conjunction of ethics and Animistic philosophy, so intimate and powerful in the higher culture, seems scarcely yet to have begun in the lower. I propose here hardly to touch upon the purely moral aspects of religion, but rather to study the animism of the world so far as it constitutes, as unquestionably it does constitute, an ancient and world-wide philosophy, of which belief is the theory and worship is the practice. Endeavouring to shape the materials for an enquiry hitherto strangely undervalued and neglected, it will now be my task to bring as clearly as may be into view the fundamental animism of the lower races, and in some slight and broken outline to trace its course into higher regions of civilization. Here let me state once for all two principal conditions under which the present research is carried on. First, as to the religious doctrines and practices examined, these are treated as belonging to theological systems devised by human reason, without supernatural aid or revelation; in other words, as being developments of Natural Religion. Second, as to the connexion between similar ideas and rites in the religions of the savage and the civilized world. While dwelling at some length on doctrines and ceremonies of the lower 428races, and sometimes particularizing for special reasons the related doctrines and ceremonies of the higher nations, it has not seemed my proper task to work out in detail the problems thus suggested among the philosophies and creeds of Christendom. Such applications, extending farthest from the direct scope of a work on primitive culture, are briefly stated in general terms, or touched in slight allusion, or taken for granted without remark. Educated readers possess the information required to work out their general bearing on theology, while more technical discussion is left to philosophers and theologians specially occupied with such arguments.

The first branch of the subject to be considered is the doctrine of human and other Souls, an examination of which will occupy the rest of the present chapter. What the doctrine of the soul is among the lower races, may be explained in stating the animistic theory of its development. It seems as though thinking men, as yet at a low level of culture, were deeply impressed by two groups of biological problems. In the first place, what is it that makes the difference between a living body and a dead one; what causes waking, sleep, trance, disease, death? In the second place, what are those human shapes which appear in dreams and visions? Looking at these two groups of phenomena, the ancient savage philosophers probably made their first step by the obvious inference that every man has two things belonging to him, namely, a life and a phantom. These two are evidently in close connexion with the body, the life as enabling it to feel and think and act, the phantom as being its image or second self; both, also, are perceived to be things separable from the body, the life as able to go away and leave it insensible or dead, the phantom as appearing to people at a distance from it. The second step would seem also easy for savages to make, seeing how extremely difficult civilized men have found it to unmake. It is merely to combine the life and the phantom. As both belong to the body, why should they not also belong to one another, and 429be manifestations of one and the same soul? Let them then be considered as united, and the result is that well-known conception which may be described as an apparitional-soul, a ghost-soul. This, at any rate, corresponds with the actual conception of the personal soul or spirit among the lower races, which may be defined as follows: It is a thin unsubstantial human image, in its nature a sort of vapour, film, or shadow; the cause of life and thought in the individual it animates; independently possessing the personal consciousness and volition of its corporeal owner, past or present; capable of leaving the body far behind, to flash swiftly from place to place; mostly impalpable and invisible, yet also manifesting physical power, and especially appearing to men waking or asleep as a phantasm separate from the body of which it bears the likeness; continuing to exist and appear to men after the death of that body; able to enter into, possess, and act in the bodies of other men, of animals, and even of things. Though this definition is by no means of universal application, it has sufficient generality to be taken as a standard, modified by more or less divergence among any particular people. Far from these world-wide opinions being arbitrary or conventional products, it is seldom even justifiable to consider their uniformity among distant races as proving communication of any sort. They are doctrines answering in the most forcible way to the plain evidence of men’s senses, as interpreted by a fairly consistent and rational primitive philosophy. So well, indeed, does primitive animism account for the facts of nature, that it has held its place into the higher levels of education. Though classic and mediæval philosophy modified it much, and modern philosophy has handled it yet more unsparingly, it has so far retained the traces of its original character, that heirlooms of primitive ages may be claimed in the existing psychology of the civilized world. Out of the vast mass of evidence, collected among the most various and distant races of mankind, typical details may now be selected to display the earlier theory of the 430soul, the relation of the parts of this theory, and the manner in which these parts have been abandoned, modified, or kept up, along the course of culture.

To understand the popular conceptions of the human soul or spirit, it is instructive to notice the words which have been found suitable to express it. The ghost or phantasm seen by the dreamer or the visionary is an unsubstantial form, like a shadow or reflexion, and thus the familiar term of the shade comes in to express the soul. Thus the Tasmanian word for the shadow is also that for the spirit;^[620] the Algonquins describe a man’s soul as otahchuk, ‘his shadow;’^[621] the Quiché language uses natub for ‘shadow, soul;’^[622] the Arawak ueja means ‘shadow, soul, image;’^[623] the Abipones made the one word loákal serve for ‘shadow, soul, echo, image.’^[624] The Zulus not only use the word tunzi for ‘shadow, spirit, ghost,’ but they consider that at death the shadow of a man will in some way depart from the corpse, to become an ancestral spirit.^[625] The Basutos not only call the spirit remaining after death the seriti or ‘shadow,’ but they think that if a man walks on the river bank, a crocodile may seize his shadow in the water and draw him in;^[626] while in Old Calabar there is found the same identification of the spirit with the ukpon or ‘shadow,’ for a man to lose which is fatal.^[627] There are thus found among the lower races not only the types of those familiar classic terms, the skia and umbra, but also what seems the fundamental thought of the stories of shadowless men still current in the folklore of Europe, and familiar to modern readers in Chamisso’s tale of Peter 431Schlemihl. Thus the dead in Purgatory knew that Dante was alive when they saw that, unlike theirs, his figure cast a shadow on the ground.^[628] Other attributes are taken into the notion of soul or spirit, with especial regard to its being the cause of life. Thus the Caribs, connecting the pulses with spiritual beings, and especially considering that in the heart dwells man’s chief soul, destined to a future heavenly life, could reasonably use the one word iouanni for ‘soul, life, heart.’^[629] The Tongans supposed the soul to exist throughout the whole extension of the body, but particularly in the heart. On one occasion, the natives were declaring to a European that a man buried months ago was nevertheless still alive. ‘And one, endeavouring to make me understand what he meant, took hold of my hand, and squeezing it, said, “This will die, but the life that is within you will never die;” with his other hand pointing to my heart.’^[630] So the Basutos say of a dead man that his heart is gone out, and of one recovering from sickness that his heart is coming back.^[631] This corresponds to the familiar Old World view of the heart as the prime mover in life, thought, and passion. The connexion of soul and blood, familiar to the Karens and Papuas, appears prominently in Jewish and Arabic philosophy.^[632] To educated moderns the idea of the Macusi Indians of Guiana may seem quaint, that although the body will decay, ‘the man in our eyes’ will not die, but wander about.^[633] Yet the association of personal animation with the pupil of the eye is familiar to European folklore, which not unreasonably discerned a sign of bewitchment or approaching death in the disappearance of the image, pupil, or baby, from the dim eyeballs of the sick man.^[634]

432The act of breathing, so characteristic of the higher animals during life, and coinciding so closely with life in its departure, has been repeatedly and naturally identified with the life or soul itself. Laura Bridgman showed in her instructive way the analogy between the effects of restricted sense and restricted civilization, when one day she made the gesture of taking something away from her mouth: ‘I dreamed,’ she explained in words, ‘that God took away my breath to heaven.’^[635] It is thus that West Australians used one word waug for ‘breath, spirit, soul;^[636] that in the Netela language of California, piuts means ‘life, breath, soul;^[637] that certain Greenlanders reckoned two souls to man, namely his shadow and his breath;^[638] that the Malays say the soul of the dying man escapes through his nostrils, and in Java use the same word ñawa for ‘breath, life, soul.’^[639] How the notions of life, heart, breath, and phantom unite in the one conception of a soul or spirit, and at the same time how loose and vague such ideas are among barbaric races, is well brought into view in the answers to a religious inquest held in 1528 among the natives of Nicaragua. ‘When they die, there comes out of their mouth something that resembles a person, and is called julio [Aztec yuli==to live]. This being goes to the place where the man and woman are. It is like a person, but does not die, and the body remains here.’ Question. ‘Do those who go up on high keep the same body, the same face, and the same limbs, as here below?’ Answer. ‘No; there is only the heart.’ Question. ‘But since they tear out their hearts [i.e. when a captive was sacrificed], what happens then?’ Answer. ‘It is not precisely the heart, but that in them which makes them live, and that quits the body when they die.’ Or, as stated in another interrogatory, 433‘It is not their heart that goes up above, but what makes them live, that is to say, the breath that issues from their mouth and is called julio.’^[640] The conception of the soul as breath may be followed up through Semitic and Aryan etymology, and thus into the main streams of the philosophy of the world. Hebrew shows nephesh, ‘breath,’ passing into all the meanings of ‘life, soul, mind, animal,’ while ruach and neshamah make the like transition from ‘breath’ to ‘spirit’; and to these the Arabic nefs and ruh correspond. The same is the history of Sanskrit âtman and prâna, of Greek psychē and pneuma, of Latin animus, anima, spiritus. So Slavonic duch has developed the meaning of ‘breath’ into that of soul or spirit; and the dialects of the Gypsies have this word dūk with the meanings of ‘breath, spirit, ghost,’ whether these pariahs brought the word from India as part of their inheritance of Aryan speech, or whether they adopted it in their migration across Slavonic lands.^[641] German geist and English ghost, too, may possibly have the same original sense of breath. And if any should think such expressions due to mere metaphor, they may judge the strength of the implied connexion between breath and spirit by cases of most unequivocal significance. Among the Seminoles of Florida, when a woman died in childbirth, the infant was held over her face to receive her parting spirit, and thus acquire strength and knowledge for its future use. These Indians could have well understood why at the death-bed of an ancient Roman, the nearest kinsman leant over to inhale the last breath of the departing (et excipies hanc animam ore pio). Their state of mind is kept up to this day among Tyrolese peasants, who can still fancy a good man’s soul to issue from his mouth at death like a little white cloud.^[642]

434It will be shown that men, in their composite and confused notions of the soul, have brought into connexion a list of manifestations of life and thought even more multifarious than this. But also, seeking to avoid such perplexity of combination, they have sometimes endeavoured to define and classify more closely, especially by the theory that man has a combination of several kinds of spirit, soul, or image, to which different functions belong. Already in the barbaric world such classification has been invented or adopted. Thus the Fijians distinguished between a man’s ‘dark spirit’ or shadow, which goes to Hades, and his ‘light spirit’ or reflexion in water or a mirror, which stays near where he dies.^[643] The Malagasy say that the saina or mind vanishes at death, the aina or life becomes mere air, but the matoatoa or ghost hovers round the tomb.^[644] In North America, the duality of the soul is a strongly marked Algonquin belief; one soul goes out and sees dreams while the other remains behind; at death one of the two abides with the body, and for this the survivors leave offerings of food, while the other departs to the land of the dead. A division into three souls is also known, and the Dakotas say that man has four souls, one remaining with the corpse, one staying in the village, one going in the air, and one to the land of spirits.^[645] The Karens distinguish between the ‘là’ or ‘kelah,’ the personal life-phantom, and the ‘thah,’ the responsible moral soul.^[646] More or less under Hindu influence, the Khonds have a fourfold division, as follows: the first soul is that capable of beatification or restoration to Boora the Good Deity; the second is attached to a Khond tribe on earth and is re-born generation after generation, so that at the 435birth of each child the priest asks who has returned; the third goes out to hold spiritual intercourse, leaving the body in a languid state, and it is this soul which can pass for a time into a tiger, and transmigrates for punishment after death; the fourth dies on the dissolution of the body.^[647] Such classifications resemble those of higher nations, as for instance the three-fold division of shade, manes, and spirit:

‘Bis duo sunt homini, manes, caro, spiritus, umbra:

Quatuor ista loci bis duo suscipiunt.

Terra tegit carnem, tumulum circumvolat umbra,

Orcus habet manes, spiritus astra petit.’

Not attempting to follow up the details of such psychical division into the elaborate systems of literary nations, I shall not discuss the distinction which the ancient Egyptians seem to have made in the Ritual of the Dead between the man’s ba, akh, ka, khaba, translated by Dr. Birch as his ‘soul,’ ‘mind,’ ‘image,’ ‘shade,’ or the Rabbinical division into what may be roughly described as the bodily, spiritual, and celestial souls, or the distinction between the emanative and genetic souls in Hindu philosophy, or the distribution of life, apparition, ancestral spirit, among the three souls of the Chinese, or the demarcations of the nous, psychē, and pneuma, or of the anima and animus, or the famous classic and mediæval theories of the vegetal, sensitive, and rational souls. Suffice it to point out here that such speculation dates back to the barbaric condition of our race, in a state fairly comparing as to scientific value with much that has gained esteem within the precincts of higher culture. It would be a difficult task to treat such classification on a consistent logical basis. Terms corresponding with those of life, mind, soul, spirit, ghost, and so forth, are not thought of as describing really separate entities, so much as the several forms and functions of one individual being. Thus 436the confusion which here prevails in our own thought and language, in a manner typical of the thought and language of mankind in general, is in fact due not merely to vagueness of terms, but to an ancient theory of substantial unity which underlies them. Such ambiguity of language, however, will be found to interfere little with the present enquiry, for the details given of the nature and action of spirits, souls, phantoms, will themselves define the exact sense such words are to be taken in.

The early animistic theory of vitality, regarding the functions of life as caused by the soul, offers to the savage mind an explanation of several bodily and mental conditions, as being effects of a departure of the soul or some of its constituent spirits. This theory holds a wide and strong position in savage biology. The South Australians express it when they say of one insensible or unconscious, that he is ‘wilyamarraba,’ i.e., ‘without soul.’^[648] Among the Algonquin Indians of North America, we hear of sickness being accounted for by the patient’s ‘shadow’ being unsettled or detached from his body, and of the convalescent being reproached for exposing himself before his shadow was safely settled down in him; where we should say that a man was ill and recovered, they would consider that he died, but came again. Another account from among the same race explains the condition of men lying in lethargy or trance; their souls have travelled to the banks of the River of Death, but have been driven back and return to reanimate their bodies.^[649] Among the Fijians, ‘when any one faints or dies, their spirit, it is said, may sometimes be brought back by calling after it; and occasionally the ludicrous scene is witnessed of a stout man lying at full length, and bawling out lustily for the return of his own soul.’^[650] To the negroes of North Guinea, derangement 437or dotage is caused by the patient being prematurely deserted by his soul, sleep being a more temporary withdrawal.^[651] Thus, in various countries, the bringing back of lost souls becomes a regular part of the sorcerer’s or priest’s profession. The Salish Indians of Oregon regard the spirit as distinct from the vital principle, and capable of quitting the body for a short time without the patient being conscious of its absence; but to avoid fatal consequences it must be restored as soon as possible, and accordingly the medicine-man in solemn form replaces it down through the patient’s head.^[652] The Turanian or Tatar races of Northern Asia strongly hold the theory of the soul’s departure in disease, and among the Buddhist tribes the Lamas carry out the ceremony of soul-restoration in most elaborate form. When a man has been robbed by a demon of his rational soul, and has only his animal soul left, his senses and memory grow weak and he falls into a dismal state. Then the Lama undertakes to cure him, and with quaint rites exorcises the evil demon. But if this fails, then it is the patient’s soul itself that cannot or will not find its way back. So the sick man is laid out in his best attire and surrounded with his most attractive possessions, the friends and relatives go thrice round the dwelling, affectionately calling back the soul by name, while as a further inducement the Lama reads from his book descriptions of the pains of hell, and the dangers incurred by a soul which wilfully abandons its body, and then at last the whole assembly declare with one voice that the wandering spirit has returned and the patient will recover.^[653] The Karens of Burma will run about pretending to catch a sick man’s wandering soul, or as they say with the Greeks and Slavs, his ‘butterfly’ (leip-pya), and at last drop it down upon his head. The Karen doctrine of the ‘là’ is indeed a perfect and well-marked 438vitalistic system. This là, soul, ghost, or genius, may be separated from the body it belongs to, and it is a matter of the deepest interest to the Karen to keep his là with him, by calling it, making offerings of food to it, and so forth. It is especially when the body is asleep, that the soul goes out and wanders; if it is detained beyond a certain time, disease ensues, and if permanently, then its owner dies. When the ‘wee’ or spirit-doctor is employed to call back the departed shade or life of a Karen, if he cannot recover it from the region of the dead, he will sometimes take the shade of a living man and transfer it to the dead, while its proper owner, whose soul has ventured out in a dream, sickens and dies. Or when a Karen becomes sick, languid and pining from his là having left him, his friends will perform a ceremony with a garment of the invalid’s and a fowl which is cooked and offered with rice, invoking the spirit with formal prayers to come back to the patient.^[654] This ceremony is perhaps ethnologically connected, though it is not easy to say by what manner of diffusion or when, with a rite still practised in China. When a Chinese is at the point of death, and his soul is supposed to be already out of his body, a relative may be seen holding up the patient’s coat on a long bamboo, to which a white cock is often fastened, while a Tauist priest by incantations brings the departed spirit into the coat, in order to put it back into the sick man. If the bamboo after a time turns round slowly in the holder’s hands, this shows that the spirit is inside the garment.^[655]

Such temporary exit of the soul has a world-wide application to the proceedings of the sorcerer, priest, or seer himself. He professes to send forth his spirit on distant 439journeys, and probably often believes his soul released for a time from its bodily prison, as in the case of that remarkable dreamer and visionary Jerome Cardan, who describes himself as having the faculty of passing out of his senses as into ecstasy whenever he will, feeling when he goes into this state a sort of separation near the heart as if his soul were departing, this state beginning from his brain and passing down his spine, and he then feeling only that he is out of himself.^[656] Thus the Australian native doctor is alleged to obtain his initiation by visiting the world of spirits in a trance of two or three days’ duration;^[657] the Khond priest authenticates his claim to office by remaining from one to fourteen days in a languid and dreamy state, caused by one of his souls being away in the divine presence;^[658] the Greenland angekok’s soul goes forth from his body to fetch his familiar demon;^[659] the Turanian shaman lies in lethargy while his soul departs to bring hidden wisdom from the land of spirits.^[660] The literature of more progressive races supplies similar accounts. A characteristic story from old Scandinavia is that of the Norse chief Ingimund, who shut up three Finns in a hut for three nights, that they might visit Iceland and inform him of the lie of the country where he was to settle; their bodies became rigid, they sent their souls on the errand, and awakening after the three days they gave a description of the Vatnsdæl.^[661] The typical classic case is the story of Hermotimos, whose prophetic soul went out from time to time to visit distant regions, till at last his wife burnt the lifeless body on the funeral pile, and when the poor soul came back, there was no longer a dwelling for it to animate.^[662] A group of the legendary visits to the 440spirit-world; which will be described in the next chapter, belong to this class. A typical spiritualistic instance may be quoted from Jung-Stilling, who says that examples have come to his knowledge of sick persons who, longing to see absent friends, have fallen into a swoon during which they have appeared to the distant objects of their affection.^[663] As an illustration from our own folklore, the well-known superstition may serve, that fasting watchers on St. John’s Eve may see the apparitions of those doomed to die during the year come with the clergyman to the church door and knock; these apparitions are spirits who come forth from their bodies, for the minister has been noticed to be much troubled in his sleep while his phantom was thus engaged, and when one of a party of watchers fell into a sound sleep and could not be roused, the others saw his apparition knock at the church door.^[664] Modern Europe has indeed kept closely enough to the lines of early philosophy, for such ideas to have little strangeness to our own time. Language preserves record of them in such expressions as ‘out of oneself,’ ‘beside oneself,’ ‘in an ecstasy,’ and he who says that his spirit goes forth to meet a friend, can still realize in the phrase a meaning deeper than metaphor.

This same doctrine forms one side of the theory of dreams prevalent among the lower races. Certain of the Greenlanders, Cranz remarks, consider that the soul quits the body in the night and goes out hunting, dancing, and visiting; their dreams, which are frequent and lively, having brought them to this opinion.^[665] Among the Indians of North America, we hear of the dreamer’s soul leaving his body and wandering in quest of things attractive to it. These things the waking man must endeavour to obtain, 441lest his soul be troubled, and quit the body altogether.^[666] The New Zealanders considered the dreaming soul to leave the body and return, even travelling to the region of the dead to hold converse with its friends.^[667] The Tagals of Luzon object to waking a sleeper, on account of the absence of his soul.^[668] The Karens, whose theory of the wandering soul has just been noticed, explain dreams to be what this là sees and experiences in its journeys when it has left the body asleep. They even account with much acuteness for the fact that we are apt to dream of people and places which we knew before; the leip-pya, they say, can only visit the regions where the body it belongs to has been already.^[669] Onward from the savage state, the idea of the spirit’s departure in sleep may be traced into the speculative philosophy of higher nations, as in the Vedanta system, and the Kabbala.^[670] St. Augustine tells one of the double narratives which so well illustrate theories of this kind. The man who tells Augustine the story relates that, at home one night before going to sleep, he saw coming to him a certain philosopher, most well known to him, who then expounded to him certain Platonic passages, which when asked previously he had refused to explain. And when he (afterwards) enquired of this philosopher why he did at his house what he had refused to do when asked at his own: ‘I did not do it,’ said the philosopher, ‘but I dreamt I did.’ And thus, says Augustine, that was exhibited to one by phantastic image while waking, which the other saw in a dream.^[671] European folklore, too, has preserved interesting details of this primitive dream-theory, such as 442the fear of turning a sleeper over lest the absent soul should miss the way back. King Gunthram’s legend is one of a group interesting from the same point of view. The king lay in the wood asleep with his head in his faithful henchman’s lap; the servant saw as it were a snake issue from his lord’s mouth and run to the brook, but it could not pass, so the servant laid his sword across the water, and the creature ran along it and up into a mountain; after a while it came back and returned into the mouth of the sleeping king, who waking told him how he had dreamt that he went over an iron bridge into a fountain full of gold.^[672] This is one of those instructive legends which preserve for us, as in a museum, relics of an early intellectual condition of our Aryan race, in thoughts which to our modern minds have fallen to the level of quaint fancy, but which still remain sound and reasonable philosophy to the savage. A Karen at this day would appreciate every point of the story; the familiar notion of spirits not crossing water which he exemplifies in his Burmese forests by stretching threads across the brook for the ghosts to pass along; the idea of the soul going forth embodied in an animal; and the theory of the dream being a real journey of the sleeper’s soul. Finally, this old belief still finds, as such beliefs so often do, a refuge in modern poetry:

‘Yon child is dreaming far away,

And is not where he seems.’

This opinion, however, only constitutes one of several parts of the theory of dreams in savage psychology. Another part has also a place here, the view that human souls come from without to visit the sleeper, who sees them as dreams. These two views are by no means incompatible. The North American Indians allowed themselves the alternative of supposing a dream to be either a visit from the soul of the person or object dreamt of, or a sight seen by the rational soul, gone out for an excursion while the sensitive 443soul remains in the body.^[673] So the Zulu may be visited in a dream by the shade of an ancestor, the itongo, who comes to warn him of danger, or he may himself be taken by the itongo in a dream to visit his distant people, and see that they are in trouble; as for the man who is passing into the morbid condition of the professional seer, phantoms are continually coming to talk to him in his sleep, till he becomes, as the expressive native phrase is, ‘a house of dreams.’^[674] In the lower range of culture, it is perhaps most frequently taken for granted that a man’s apparition in a dream is a visit from his disembodied spirit, which the dreamer, to use an expressive Ojibwa idiom, ‘sees when asleep.’ Such a thought comes out clearly in the Fijian opinion that a living man’s spirit may leave the body, to trouble other people in their sleep;^[675] or in a recent account of an old Indian woman of British Columbia sending for the medicine-man to drive away the dead people who came to her every night.^[676] A modern observer’s description of the state of mind of the negroes of West Africa in this respect is extremely characteristic and instructive. ‘All their dreams are construed into visits from the spirits of their deceased friends. The cautions, hints, and warnings which come to them through this source are received with the most serious and deferential attention, and are always acted upon in their waking hours. The habit of relating their dreams, which is universal, greatly promotes the habit of dreaming itself, and hence their sleeping hours are characterized by almost as much intercourse with the dead as their waking are with the living. This is, no doubt, one of the reasons of their excessive superstitiousness. Their imaginations become so lively that they can scarcely distinguish between their dreams and their waking thoughts, between the real and the ideal, and 444they consequently utter falsehood without intending, and profess to see things which never existed.’^[677]

To the Greek of old, the dream-soul was what to the modern savage it still is. Sleep, loosing cares of mind, fell on Achilles as he lay by the sounding sea, and there stood over him the soul of Patroklos, like to him altogether in stature, and the beauteous eyes, and the voice, and the garments that wrapped his skin; he spake, and Achilles stretched out to grasp him with loving hands, but caught him not, and like a smoke the soul sped twittering below the earth. Along the ages that separate us from Homeric times, the apparition in dreams of men living or dead has been a subject of philosophic speculation and of superstitious fear.^[678] Both the phantom of the living and the ghost of the dead figure in Cicero’s typical tale. Two Arcadians came to Megara together, one lodged at a friend’s house, the other at an inn. In the night this latter appeared to his fellow-traveller, imploring his help, for the innkeeper was plotting his death; the sleeper sprang up in alarm, but thinking the vision of no consequence went to sleep again. Then a second time his companion appeared to him, to entreat that though he had failed to help, he would at least avenge, for the innkeeper had killed him and hidden his body in a dung-cart, wherefore he charged his fellow-traveller to be early next morning at the city-gate before the cart passed out. Struck with this second dream, the traveller went as bidden, and there found the cart; the body of the murdered man was in it, and the innkeeper was brought to justice. ‘Quid hoc somnio dici potest divinius!’^[679] Augustine discusses with reference to the nature of the soul various dream-stories of his time, where the apparitions of men dead or living are seen in dreams. 445In one of the latter he himself figured, for when a disciple of his, Eulogius the rhetor of Carthage, once could not get to sleep for thinking of an obscure passage in Cicero’s Rhetoric, that night Augustine came to him in a dream and explained it. But Augustine’s tendency was toward the modern theory of dreams, and in this case he says it was certainly his image that appeared, not himself, who was far across the sea, neither knowing nor caring about the matter.^[680] As we survey the immense series of dream-stories of similar types in patristic, mediæval, and modern literature, we may find it difficult enough to decide which are truth and which are fiction. But along the course of these myriad narratives of human phantoms appearing in dreams to cheer or torment, to warn or inform, or to demand fulfilment of their own desires, the problem of dream-apparitions may be traced in progress of gradual determination, from the earlier conviction that a disembodied soul really comes into the presence of the sleeper, toward the later opinion that such a phantasm is produced in the dreamer’s mind without the perception of any external objective figure.

The evidence of visions corresponds with the evidence of dreams in their bearing on primitive theories of the soul,^[681] and the two classes of phenomena substantiate and supplement one another. Even in healthy waking life, the savage or barbarian has never learnt to make that rigid distinction between subjective and objective, between imagination and reality, to enforce which is one of the main results of scientific education. Still less, when disordered in body and mind he sees around him phantom human forms, can he distrust the evidence of his very senses. Thus it comes to pass that throughout the lower civilization men believe, with the most vivid and intense belief, in the objective reality of the human spectres which they see in sickness, exhaustion, or excitement. As will be hereafter noticed, one main reason of the practices of fasting, penance, narcotising by drugs, and 446other means of bringing on morbid exaltation, is that the patients may obtain the sight of spectral beings, from whom they look to gain spiritual knowledge and even worldly power. Human ghosts are among the principal of these phantasmal figures. There is no doubt that honest visionaries describe ghosts as they really appear to their perception, while even the impostors who pretend to see them conform to the descriptions thus established; thus, in West Africa, a man’s kla or soul, becoming at his death a sisa or ghost, can remain in the house with the corpse, but is only visible to the wong-man, the spirit-doctor.^[682] Sometimes the phantom has the characteristic quality of not being visible to all of an assembled company. Thus the natives of the Antilles believed that the dead appeared on the roads when one went alone, but not when many went together;^[683] thus among the Finns the ghosts of the dead were to be seen by the shamans, but not by men generally unless in dreams.^[684] Such is perhaps the meaning of the description of Samuel’s ghost, visible to the witch of Endor, but not to Saul, for he has to ask her what it is she sees.^[685] Yet this test of the nature of an apparition is one which easily breaks down. We know well how in civilized countries a current rumour of some one having seen a phantom is enough to bring a sight of it to others whose minds are in a properly receptive state. The condition of the modern ghost-seer, whose imagination passes on such slight excitement into positive hallucination is rather the rule than the exception among uncultured and intensely imaginative tribes, whose minds may be thrown off their balance by a touch, a word, a gesture, an unaccustomed noise. Among savage tribes, however, as among civilized races who have inherited remains of early philosophy formed under similar conditions, the doctrine of visibility or 447invisibility of phantoms has been obviously shaped with reference to actual experience. To declare that souls or ghosts are necessarily either visible or invisible, would directly contradict the evidence of men’s senses. But to assert or imply, as the lower races do, that they are visible sometimes and to some persons, but not always or to every one, is to lay down an explanation of facts which is not indeed our usual modern explanation, but which is a perfectly rational and intelligible product of early science.

Without discussing on their merits the accounts of what is called ‘second sight,’ it may be pointed out that they are related among savage tribes, as when Captain Jonathan Carver obtained from a Cree medicine-man a true prophecy of the arrival of a canoe with news next day at noon; or when Mr. J. Mason Brown, travelling with two voyageurs on the Coppermine River, was met by Indians of the very band he was seeking, these having been sent by their medicine-man, who, on enquiry, stated that ‘He saw them coming, and heard them talk on their journey.’^[686] These are analogous to accounts of the Highland second-sight, as when Pennant heard of a gentleman of the Hebrides, said to have the convenient gift of foreseeing visitors in time to get ready for them, or when Dr. Johnson was told by another laird that a labouring man of his had predicted his return to the island, and described the peculiar livery his servant had been newly dressed in.^[687]

As a general rule, people are apt to consider it impossible for a man to be in two places at once, and indeed a saying to that effect has become a popular saw. But the rule is so far from being universally accepted, that the word ‘bilocation’ has been invented to express the miraculous faculty possessed by certain Saints of the Roman Church, of being in two places at once; like St. Alfonso di Liguori, who had the useful power of preaching his sermon in church while 448he was confessing penitents at home.^[688] The reception and explanation of these various classes of stories fit perfectly with the primitive animistic theory of apparitions, and the same is true of the following most numerous class of the second-sight narratives.

Death is the event which, in all stages of culture, brings thought to bear most intensely, though not always most healthily, on the problems of psychology. The apparition of the disembodied soul has in all ages been thought to bear especial relation to its departure from its body at death. This is well shown by the reception not only of a theory of ghosts, but of a special doctrine of ‘wraiths’ or ‘fetches.’ Thus the Karens say that a man’s spirit, appearing after death, may thus announce it.^[689] In New Zealand it is ominous to see the figure of an absent person, for if it be shadowy and the face not visible, his death may ere long be expected, but if the face be seen he is dead already. A party of Maoris (one of whom told the story) were seated round a fire in the open air, when there appeared, seen only by two of them, the figure of a relative left ill at home; they exclaimed, the figure vanished, and on the return of the party it appeared that the sick man had died about the time of the vision.^[690] Examining the position of the doctrine of wraiths among the higher races, we find it especially prominent in three intellectual districts, Christian hagiology, popular folklore, and modern spiritualism. St. Anthony saw the soul of St. Ammonius carried to heaven in the midst of choirs of angels, the same day that the holy hermit died five days’ journey off in the desert of Nitria; when St. Ambrose died on Easter Eve, several newly-baptized children saw the holy bishop, and pointed him out to their parents, but these with their less pure eyes could not behold him; and so forth.^[691] 449Folklore examples abound in Silesia and the Tyrol, where the gift of wraith-seeing still flourishes, with the customary details of funerals, churches, four-cross-roads, and headless phantoms, and an especial association with New Year’s Eve. The accounts of ‘second-sight’ from North Britain mostly belong to a somewhat older date. Thus the St. Kilda people used to be haunted by their own spectral doubles, forerunners of impending death, and in 1799 a traveller writes of the peasants of Kirkcudbrightshire, ‘It is common among them to fancy that they see the wraiths of persons dying, which will be visible to one and not to others present with him. Within these last twenty years, it was hardly possible to meet with any person who had not seen many wraiths and ghosts in the course of his experience.’ Those who discuss the authenticity of the second-sight stories as actual evidence, must bear in mind that they prove a little too much; they vouch not only for human apparitions, but for such phantoms as demon-dogs, and for still more fanciful symbolic omens. Thus a phantom shroud seen in spiritual vision on a living man predicts his death, immediate if it is up to his head, less nearly approaching if it is only up to his waist; and to see in spiritual vision a spark of fire fall upon a person’s arm or breast, is a forerunner of a dead child to be seen in his arms.^[692] As visionaries often see phantoms of living persons without any remarkable event coinciding with their hallucinations, it is naturally admitted that a man’s phantom or ‘double’ may be seen without portending anything in particular. The spiritualistic theory specially insists on cases of apparition where the person’s death corresponds more or less nearly with the time when some friend perceives his phantom.^[693] Narratives of this class, which I can here only specify without arguing on them, are 450abundantly in circulation. Thus, I have an account by a lady, who ‘saw, as it were, the form of some one laid out,’ near the time when a brother died at Melbourne, and who mentions another lady known to her, who thought she saw her own father look in at the church window at the moment he was dying in his own house. Another account is sent me by a Shetland lady, who relates that about twenty years ago she and a girl leading her pony recognized the familiar figure of one Peter Sutherland, whom they knew to be at the time in ill-health in Edinburgh; he turned a corner and they saw no more of him, but next week came the news of his sudden death.

That the apparitional human soul bears the likeness of its fleshly body, is the principle implicitly accepted by all who believe it really and objectively present in dreams and visions. My own view is that nothing but dreams and visions could have ever put into men’s minds such an idea as that of souls being ethereal images of bodies. It is thus habitually taken for granted in animistic philosophy, savage or civilized, that souls set free from the earthly body are recognized by a likeness to it which they still retain, whether as ghostly wanderers on earth or inhabitants of the world beyond the grave. Man’s spirit, says Swedenborg, is his mind, which lives after death in complete human form, and this is the poet’s dictum in ‘In Memoriam:’

‘Eternal form shall still divide

The eternal soul from all beside;

And I shall know him when we meet.’

This world-wide thought, coming into view here in a multitude of cases from all grades of culture, needs no collection of ordinary instances to illustrate it.^[694] But a quaint and special group of beliefs will serve to display the thoroughness 451with which the soul is thus conceived as an image of the body. As a consistent corollary to such an opinion, it is argued that the mutilation of the body will have a corresponding effect upon the soul, and very low savage races have philosophy enough to work out this idea. Thus it was recorded of the Indians of Brazil by one of the early European visitors, that they ‘believe that the dead arrive in the other world wounded or hacked to pieces, in fact just as they left this.’^[695] Thus, too, the Australian who has slain his enemy will cut off the right thumb of the corpse, so that although the spirit will become a hostile ghost, it cannot throw with its mutilated hand the shadowy spear, and may be safely left to wander, malignant but harmless.^[696] The negro fears long sickness before death, such as will send him lean and feeble into the next world. His theory of the mutilation of soul with body could not be brought more vividly into view than in that ugly story of the West Indian planter, whose slaves began to seek in suicide at once relief from present misery and restoration to their native land; but the white man was too cunning for them, he cut off the heads and hands of the corpses, and the survivors saw that not even death could save them from a master who could maim their very souls in the next world.^[697] The same rude and primitive belief continues among nations risen far higher in intellectual rank. The Chinese hold in especial horror the punishment of decapitation, considering that he who quits this world lacking a member will so arrive in the next, and a case is recorded lately of a criminal at Amoy who for this reason begged to die instead by the cruel death of crucifixion, and was crucified accordingly.^[698] The series ends as usual in the folklore of the civilized world. The phantom skeleton in chains that haunted the house at 452Bologna, showed the way to the garden where was buried the real chained fleshless skeleton it belonged to, and came no more when the remains had been duly buried. When the Earl of Cornwall met the fetch of his friend William Rufus carried black and naked on a black goat across the Bodmin moors, he saw that it was wounded through the midst of the breast; and afterwards he heard that at that very hour the king had been slain in the New Forest by the arrow of Walter Tirell.^[699]

In studying the nature of the soul as conceived among the lower races, and in tracing such conceptions onward among the higher, circumstantial details are available. It is as widely recognized among mankind that souls or ghosts have voices, as that they have visible forms, and indeed the evidence for both is of the same nature. Men who perceive evidently that souls do talk when they present themselves in dream or vision, naturally take for granted at once the objective reality of the ghostly voice, and of the ghostly form from which it proceeds. This is involved in the series of narratives of spiritual communications with living men, from savagery onward to civilization, while the more modern doctrine of the subjectivity of such phenomena recognizes the phenomena themselves, but offers a different explanation of them. One special conception, however, requires particular notice. This defines the spirit-voice as being a low murmur, chirp, or whistle, as it were the ghost of a voice. The Algonquin Indians of North America could hear the shadow-souls of the dead chirp like crickets.^[700] The divine spirits of the New Zealand dead, coming to converse with the living, utter their words in whistling tones, and such utterances by a squeaking noise are mentioned elsewhere in Polynesia.^[701] The Zulu diviner’s familiar 453spirits are ancestral manes, who talk in a low whistling tone short of a full whistle, whence they have their name of ‘imilozi’ or whistlers.^[702] These ideas correspond with classic descriptions of the ghostly voice, as a ‘twitter or ‘thin murmur:’

Ψυχὴ δὲ κατὰ χθονὸς ἠύτε καπνὸς,

Ψχετο τετριγυία.’^[703]

‘Umbra cruenta Remi visa est assistere lecto,

Atque haec exiguo murmure verba loqui.’^[704]

As the attributes of the soul or ghost extend to other spiritual beings, and the utterances of such are to a great extent given by the voice of mediums, we connect these accounts with the notion that the language of demons is also a low whistle or mutter, whence the well-known practice of whispering or murmuring charms, the ‘susurrus necromanticus’ of sorcerers, to whom the already cited description of ‘wizards that peep (i.e. chirp) and mutter’ is widely applicable.^[705]

The conception of dreams and visions as caused by present objective figures, and the identification of such phantom souls with the shadow and the breath, has led to the treatment of souls as substantial material beings. Thus it is a usual proceeding to make openings through solid materials to allow souls to pass. The Iroquois in old times used to leave an opening in the grave for the lingering soul to visit its body, and some of them still 454bore holes in the coffin for the same purpose.^[706] The Malagasy sorcerer, for the cure of a sick man who had lost his soul, would make a hole in a burial-house to let out a spirit which he would catch in his cap and so convey to the patient’s head.^[707] The Chinese make a hole in the roof to let out the soul at death.^[708] And lastly, the custom of opening a window or door for the departing soul when it quits the body is to this day a very familiar superstition in France, Germany, and England.^[709] Again, the souls of the dead are thought susceptible of being beaten, hurt and driven like any other living creatures. Thus the Queensland aborigines would beat the air in an annual mock fight, held to scare away the souls that death had let loose among the living since last year.^[710] Thus North American Indians, when they had tortured an enemy to death, ran about crying and beating with sticks to scare the ghost away; they have been known to set nets round their cabins to catch and keep out neighbours’ departed souls; fancying the soul of a dying man to go out at the wigwam roof, they would habitually beat the sides with sticks to drive it forth; we even hear of the widow going off from her husband’s funeral followed by a person flourishing a handful of twigs about her head like a flyflapper, to drive off her husband’s ghost and leave her free to marry again.^[711] With a kindlier feeling, the Congo negroes abstained for a whole year after a death from sweeping the house, lest the dust should injure the delicate substance of the ghost;^[712] the Tonquinese avoided house-cleaning during the festival when the souls of the dead came back to their 455houses for the New Year’s visit;^[713] and it seems likely that the special profession of the Roman ‘everriatores’ who swept the houses out after a funeral, was connected with a similar idea.^[714] To this day, it remains a German peasants’ saying that it is wrong to slam a door, lest one should pinch a soul in it.^[715] The not uncommon practice of strewing ashes to show the footprints of ghosts or demons takes for granted that they are substantial bodies. In the literature of animism, extreme tests of the weight of ghosts are now and then forthcoming. They range from the declaration of a Basuto diviner that the late queen had been bestriding his shoulders, and he never felt such a weight in his life, to Glanvil’s story of David Hunter the neat-herd, who lifted up the old woman’s ghost, and she felt just like a bag of feathers in his arms, or the pathetic German superstition that the dead mother’s coming back in the night to suckle the baby she has left on earth, may be known by the hollow pressed down in the bed where she lay, and at last down to the alleged modern spiritualistic reckoning of the weight of a human soul at from 3 to 4 ounces.^[716]

Explicit statements as to the substance of soul are to be found both among low and high races, in an instructive series of definitions. The Tongans imagined the human soul to be the finer or more aeriform part of the body, which leaves it suddenly at the moment of death; something comparable to the perfume and essence of a flower as related to the more solid vegetable fibre.^[717] The Greenland seers described the soul as they habitually perceived it in their visions; it is pale and soft, they said, and he who tries to seize it feels nothing, for it has no flesh nor bone 456nor sinew.^[718] The Caribs did not think the soul so immaterial as to be invisible, but said it was subtle and thin like a purified body.^[719] Turning to higher races, we may take the Siamese as an example of a people who conceive of souls as consisting of subtle matter escaping sight and touch, or as united to a swiftly moving aerial body.^[720] In the classic world, it is recorded as an opinion of Epicurus that ‘they who say the soul is incorporeal talk folly, for it could neither do nor suffer anything were it such.’^[721] Among the Fathers, Irenæus describes souls as incorporeal in comparison with mortal bodies,^[722] and Tertullian relates a vision or revelation of a certain Montanist prophetess, of the soul seen by her corporeally, thin and lucid, aerial in colour and human in form.^[723] For an example of mediæval doctrine, may be cited a 14th-century English poem, the ‘Ayenbite of Inwyt’ (i.e. ‘Remorse of Conscience’) which points out how the soul, by reason of the thinness of its substance, suffers all the more in purgatory:

‘The soul is more tendre and nesche

Than the bodi that hath bones and fleysche;

Thanne the soul that is so tendere of kinde,

Mote nedis hure penaunce hardere y-finde,

Than eni bodi that evere on live was.’^[724]

The doctrine of the ethereal soul passed on into more modern philosophy, and the European peasant holds fast to it still; as Wuttke says, the ghosts of the dead have to him a misty and evanescent materiality, for they have bodies as we have, though of other kind: they can eat and drink, they can be wounded and killed.^[725] Nor was the ancient 457doctrine ever more distinctly stated than by a modern spiritualistic writer, who observes that ‘a spirit is no immaterial substance; on the contrary, the spiritual organization is composed of matter ... in a very high state of refinement and attenuation.’^[726]

Among rude races, the original conception of the human soul seems to have been that of ethereality, or vaporous materiality, which has held so large a place in human thought ever since. In fact, the later metaphysical notion of immateriality could scarcely have conveyed any meaning to a savage. It is moreover to be noticed that, as to the whole nature and action of apparitional souls, the lower philosophy escapes various difficulties which down to modern times have perplexed metaphysicians and theologians of the civilized world. Considering the thin ethereal body of the soul to be itself sufficient and suitable for visibility, movement, and speech, the primitive animists required no additional hypotheses to account for these manifestations; they had no place for theories such as detailed by Calmet, as that immaterial souls have their own vaporous bodies, or occasionally have such vaporous bodies provided for them by supernatural means to enable them to appear as spectres, or that they possess the power of condensing the circumambient air into phantom-like bodies to invest themselves in, or of forming from it vocal instruments.^[727] It appears to have been within systematic schools of civilized philosophy that the transcendental definitions of the immaterial soul were obtained, by abstraction from the primitive conception of the ethereal-material soul, so as to reduce it from a physical to a metaphysical entity.

Departing from the body at the time of death, the soul or spirit is considered set free to linger near the tomb, to wander on earth or flit in the air, or to travel to the proper region of spirits—the world beyond the grave. The principal conceptions of the lower psychology as to a Future 458Life will be considered in the following chapters, but for the present purpose of investigating the theory of souls in general, it will be well to enter here upon one department of the subject. Men do not stop short at the persuasion that death releases the soul to a free and active existence, but they quite logically proceed to assist nature, by slaying men in order to liberate their souls for ghostly uses. Thus there arises one of the most widespread, distinct, and intelligible rites of animistic religion—that of funeral human sacrifice for the service of the dead. When a man of rank dies and his soul departs to its own place, wherever and whatever that place may be, it is a rational inference of early philosophy that the souls of attendants, slaves, and wives, put to death at his funeral, will make the same journey and continue their service in the next life, and the argument is frequently stretched further, to include the souls of new victims sacrificed in order that they may enter upon the same ghostly servitude. It will appear from the ethnography of this rite that it is not strongly marked in the very lowest levels of culture, but that, arising in the lower barbaric stage, it develops itself in the higher, and thenceforth continues or dwindles in survival.

Of the murderous practices to which this opinion leads, remarkably distinct accounts may be cited from among tribes of the Indian Archipelago. The following account is given of the funerals of great men among the rude Kayans of Borneo:—‘Slaves are killed in order that they may follow the deceased and attend upon him. Before they are killed the relations who surround them enjoin them to take great care of their master when they join him, to watch and shampoo him when he is indisposed, to be always near him, and to obey all his behests. The female relatives of the deceased then take a spear and slightly wound the victims, after which the males spear them to death.’ Again, the opinion of the Idaan is ‘that all whom they kill in this world shall attend them as slaves after death. This notion of future interest in the destruction of the human species is 459a great impediment to an intercourse with them, as murder goes farther than present advantage or resentment. From the same principle they will purchase a slave, guilty of any capital crime, at fourfold his value, that they may be his executioners.’ With the same idea is connected the ferocious custom of ‘head-hunting,’ so prevalent among the Dayaks before Rajah Brooke’s time. They considered that the owner of every human head they could procure would serve them in the next world, where, indeed, a man’s rank would be according to his number of heads in this. They would continue the mourning for a dead man till a head was brought in, to provide him with a slave to accompany him to the ‘habitation of souls;’ a father who lost his child would go out and kill the first man he met, as a funeral ceremony; a young man might not marry till he had procured a head, and some tribes would bury with a dead man the first head he had taken, together with spears, cloth, rice, and betel. Waylaying and murdering men for their heads became, in fact, the Dayaks’ national sport, and they remarked ‘the white men read books, we hunt for heads instead.’^[728] Of such rites in the Pacific islands, the most hideously purposeful accounts reach us from the Fiji group. Till lately, a main part of the ceremony of a great man’s funeral was the strangling of wives, friends, and slaves, for the distinct purpose of attending him into the world of spirits. Ordinarily the first victim was the wife of the deceased, and more than one if he had several, and their corpses, oiled as for a feast, clothed with new fringed girdles, with heads dressed and ornamented, and vermilion and turmeric powder spread on their faces and bosoms, were laid by the side of the dead warrior. Associates and inferior attendants were likewise slain, and these bodies 460were spoken of as ‘grass for bedding the grave.’ When Ra Mbithi, the pride of Somosomo, was lost at sea, seventeen of his wives were killed; and after the news of the massacre of the Namena people, in 1839, eighty women were strangled to accompany the spirits of their murdered husbands. Such sacrifices took place under the same pressure of public opinion which kept up the widow-burning in modern India. The Fijian widow was worked upon by her relatives with all the pressure of persuasion and of menace; she understood well that life to her henceforth would mean a wretched existence of neglect, disgrace, and destitution; and tyrannous custom, as hard to struggle against in the savage as in the civilized world, drove her to the grave. Thus, far from resisting, she became importunate for death, and the new life to come, and till public opinion reached a more enlightened state, the missionaries often used their influence in vain to save from the strangling-cord some wife whom they could have rescued, but who herself refused to live. So repugnant to the native mind was the idea of a chieftain going unattended into the other world, that the missionaries’ prohibition of the cherished custom was one reason of the popular dislike to Christianity. Many of the nominal Christians, when once a chief of theirs was shot from an ambush, esteemed it most fortunate that a stray shot at the same time killed a young man at a distance from him, and thus provided a companion for the spirit of the slain chief.^[729]

In America, the funeral human sacrifice makes its characteristic appearance. A good example may be taken from among the Osages, whose habit was sometimes to plant in the cairn raised over a corpse a pole with an enemy’s scalp hanging to the top. Their notion was that by taking an enemy and suspending his scalp over the grave of a deceased friend, the spirit of the victim became subjected to the spirit 461of the buried warrior in the land of spirits. Hence the last and best service that could be performed for a deceased relative was to take an enemy’s life, and thus transmit it by his scalp.^[730] The correspondence of this idea with that just mentioned among the Dayaks is very striking. With a similar intention, the Caribs would slay on the dead master’s grave any of his slaves they could lay hands on.^[731] Among the native peoples risen to considerably higher grades of social and political life, these practices were not suppressed but exaggerated, in the ghastly sacrifices of warriors, slaves, and wives, who departed to continue their duteous offices at the funeral of the chief or monarch in Central America^[732] and Mexico,^[733] in Bogota^[734] and Peru.^[735] It is interesting to notice, in somewhat favourable contrast with these customs of comparatively cultured American nations, the practice of certain rude tribes of the North-West. The Quakeolths, for instance, did not actually sacrifice the widow, but they made her rest her head on her husband’s corpse while it was being burned, until at last she was dragged more dead than alive from the flames; if she recovered, she collected her husband’s ashes and carried them about with her for three years, during which any levity or deficiency of grief would render her an outcast. This looks like a mitigated survival from an earlier custom of actual widow-burning.^[736]

Of such funeral rites, carried out to the death, graphic 462and horrid descriptions are recorded in the countries across Africa—East, Central, and West. A headman of the Wadoe is buried sitting in a shallow pit, and with the corpse a male and female slave alive, he with a bill-hook in his hand to cut fuel for his lord in the death-world, she seated on a little stool with the dead chief’s head in her lap. A chief of Unyamwezi is entombed in a vaulted pit, sitting on a low stool with a bow in his right hand, and provided with a pot of native beer; with him are shut in alive three women slaves, and the ceremony is concluded with a libation of beer on the earth heaped up above them all. The same idea which in Guinea makes it common for the living to send messages by the dying to the dead, is developed in Ashanti and Dahome into a monstrous system of massacre. The King of Dahome must enter Deadland with a ghostly court of hundreds of wives, eunuchs, singers, drummers, and soldiers. Nor is this all. Captain Burton thus describes the yearly ‘Customs:’—‘They periodically supply the departed monarch with fresh attendants in the shadowy world. For unhappily these murderous scenes are an expression, lamentably mistaken but perfectly sincere, of the liveliest filial piety.’ Even this annual slaughter must be supplemented by almost daily murder:—‘Whatever action, however trivial, is performed by the King, it must dutifully be reported to his sire in the shadowy realm. A victim, almost always a war-captive, is chosen; the message is delivered to him, an intoxicating draught of rum follows it, and he is dispatched to Hades in the best of humours.’^[737] In southern districts of Africa, accounts of the same class begin in Congo and Angola with the recorded slaying of the dead man’s favourite wives, to live with him in the other world, a practice still in vogue among the Chevas of the Zambesi district, and formerly known among the Maravis; while the funeral sacrifice of attendants with a chief is a 463thing of the past among the Barotse, as among the Zulus, who yet have not forgotten the days when the chief’s servants and attendant warriors were cast into the fire which had consumed his body, that they might go with him, and prepare things beforehand, and get food for him.^[738]

If now we turn to the records of Asia and Europe, we shall find the sacrifice of attendants for the dead widely prevalent in both continents in old times, while in the east its course may be traced continuing onward to our own day. The two Mohammedans who travelled in Southern Asia in the ninth century relate that on the accession of certain kings a quantity of rice is prepared, which is eaten by some three or four hundred men, who present themselves voluntarily to share it, thereby undertaking to burn themselves at the monarch’s death. With this corresponds Marco Polo’s thirteenth-century account in Southern India of the king of Maabar’s guard of horsemen, who, when he dies and his body is burnt, throw themselves into the fire to do him service in the next world.^[739] In the seventeenth century the practice is described as still prevailing in Japan, where, on the death of a nobleman, from ten to thirty of his servants put themselves to death by the ‘hara kari,’ or ripping-up, having indeed engaged during his lifetime, by the solemn compact of drinking wine together, to give their bodies to their lord at his death. Yet already in ancient times such funeral sacrifices were passing into survival, when the servants who followed their master in death were replaced by clay images set up at the tomb.^[740] Among the Ossetes of the Caucasus, an interesting relic of widow-sacrifice is still kept up: the dead man’s widow and his saddle-horse are led thrice round the grave, and no man may marry the 464widow or mount the horse thus devoted.^[741] In China, legend preserves the memory of the ancient funeral human sacrifice. The brother of Chin Yang, a disciple of Confucius, died, and his widow and steward wished to bury some living persons with him, to serve him in the regions below. Thereupon the sage suggested that the proper victims would be the widow and steward themselves, but this not precisely meeting their views, the matter dropped, and the deceased was interred without attendants. This story at least shows the rite to have been not only known but understood in China long ago. In modern China, the suicide of widows to accompany their husbands is a recognized practice, sometimes even performed in public. Moreover, the ceremonies of providing sedan-bearers and an umbrella-bearer for the dead, and sending mounted horsemen to announce beforehand his arrival to the authorities of Hades, although these bearers and messengers are only made of paper and burnt, seem to represent survivals of a more murderous reality.^[742]

The Aryan race gives striking examples of the rite of funeral human sacrifice in its sternest shape, whether in history or in myth, that records as truly as history the manners of old days.^[743] The episodes of the Trojan captives laid with the horses and hounds on the funeral pile of Patroklos, and of Evadne throwing herself into the funeral pile of her husband, and Pausanias’s narrative of the suicide of the three Messenian widows, are among its Greek representatives.^[744] In Scandinavian myth, Baldr is burnt with his 465dwarf foot-page, his horse and saddle; Brynhild lies on the pile by her beloved Sigurd, and men and maids follow after them on the hell-way.^[745] The Gauls in Cæsar’s time burned at the dead man’s sumptuous funeral whatever was dear to him, animals also, and much-loved slaves and clients.^[746] Old mentions of Slavonic heathendom describe the burning of the dead with clothing and weapons, horses and hounds, with faithful servants, and above all, with wives. Thus St. Boniface says that ‘the Wends keep matrimonial love with so great zeal, that the wife may refuse to survive her husband, and she is held praiseworthy among women who slays herself by her own hand, that she may be burnt on one pyre with her lord.’^[747] This Aryan rite of widow-sacrifice has not only an ethnographic and antiquarian interest, but even a place in modern politics. In Brahmanic India the widow of a Hindu of the Brahman or the Kshatriya caste was burnt on the funeral pile with her husband, as a satî or ‘good woman,’ which word has passed into English as suttee. Mentioned in classic and mediæval times, the practice was in full vigour at the beginning of the last century.^[748] Often one dead husband took many wives with him. Some went willingly and gaily to the new life, many were driven by force of custom, by fear of disgrace, by family persuasion, by priestly threats and promises, by sheer violence. When the rite was suppressed under modern British rule, the priesthood resisted to the uttermost, appealing to the Veda, as sanctioning the ordinance, and demanding that the foreign rulers should respect it. Yet in fact, as Prof. H. H. Wilson proved, the priests had actually falsified their sacred Veda in support of a rite enjoined by long and inveterate prejudice, but not by the traditional standards of Hindu faith. The ancient Brahmanic 466funeral rites have been minutely detailed from the Sanskrit authorities in an essay by Prof. Max Müller. Their directions are that the widow is to be set on the funeral pile with her husband’s corpse, and if he be a warrior his bow is to be placed there too. But then a brother-in-law or adopted child or old servant is to lead the widow down again at the summons, ‘Rise, woman, come to the world of life; thou sleepest nigh unto him whose life is gone. Come to us. Thou hast thus fulfilled thy duties of a wife to the husband who once took thy hand, and made thee a mother.’ The bow, however, is to be broken and thrown back upon the pile, and the dead man’s sacrificial instruments are to be laid with him and really consumed. While admitting that the modern ordinance of Suttee-burning is a corrupt departure from the early Brahmanic ritual, we may nevertheless find reason to consider the practice as not a new invention by the later Hindu priesthood, but as the revival, under congenial influences, of an ancient Aryan rite belonging originally to a period even earlier than the Veda. The ancient authorized ceremony looks as though, in a primitive form of the rite, the widow had been actually sent with the dead, for which real sacrifice a humaner law substituted a mere pretence. This view is supported by the existence of an old and express prohibition of the wife being sacrificed, a prohibition seemingly directed against a real custom, ‘to follow the dead husband is prohibited, so says the law of the Brahmans. With regard to the other castes this law for women may be or may not be.’^[749] To treat the Hindu widow-burning as a case of survival and revival seems to me most in accordance with a general ethnographic view of the subject. Widow-sacrifice is found in various regions of the world under a low state of civilization, and 467this fits with the hypothesis of its having belonged to the Aryan race while yet in an early and barbarous condition. Thus the prevalence of a rite of suttee like that of modern India among ancient Aryan nations settled in Europe, Greeks, Scandinavians, Germans, Slaves, may be simply accounted for by direct inheritance from the remote common antiquity of them all. If this theory be sound, it will follow that ancient as the Vedic ordinances may be, they represent in this matter a reform and a reaction against a yet more ancient barbaric rite of widow-sacrifice, which they prohibited in fact, but yet kept up in symbol. The history of religion displays but too plainly the proneness of mankind to relapse, in spite of reformation, into the lower and darker condition of the past. Stronger and more tenacious than even Vedic authority, the hideous custom of the suttee may have outlived an attempt to suppress it in early Brahmanic times, and the English rulers, in abolishing it, may have abolished a relic not merely of degenerate Hinduism, but of the far more remotely ancient savagery out of which the Aryan civilization had grown.