Note 112.1 — PSYCHE’S TASK

The fear of ghosts. The particular superstition which has had this salutary effect is the fear of ghosts, especially the ghosts of the murdered. The fear of ghosts is widespread, perhaps universal, among savages; it is hardly extinct among ourselves. If it were extinct, some learned societies might put up their shutters. Dead or alive, the fear of ghosts has certainly not been an unmixed blessing. Indeed it might with some show of reason be maintained that no belief has done so much to retard the economic and thereby the social progress of mankind as the belief in the immortality of the soul; for this belief has led race after race, generation after generation, to sacrifice the real wants of the living to the imaginary wants of the dead. The waste and destruction of life and property which this faith has entailed are enormous and incalculable. Disastrous consequences entailed by the fear of the dead. Without entering into details I will illustrate by a single example the disastrous economic, political, and moral consequences which flow from that systematic destruction of property which the fear of the dead has imposed on many races. Speaking of the Patagonians, the well-informed and intelligent traveller d’Orbigny observes: “They have no laws, no punishments inflicted on the guilty. Each lives as he pleases, and the greatest thief is the most highly esteemed, because he is the most dexterous. A motive which will always prevent them from abandoning the practice of theft, and at the same time will always present an obstacle to their ever forming fixed settlements, is the religious prejudice which, on the death of one of their number, obliges them to destroy his property. A Patagonian, who has amassed during the whole of his life an estate by thieving from the whites or exchanging the products of the chase with neighbouring tribes, has done nothing for his heirs; all his savings are destroyed with him, and his children are obliged to rebuild their fortunes afresh,—a custom which, I may observe in passing, is found also among the Tamanaques of the Orinoco, who ravage the field of the deceased and cut down the trees which he has planted;112.1 and among the Yuracares, who abandon and shut up the house of the dead, regarding it as a profanation to gather a single fruit from the trees of his field. It is easy to see that with such customs they can nourish no real ambition since their needs are limited to themselves; it is one of the causes of their natural indolence and is a motive which, so long as it exists, will always impede the progress of their civilization. Why should they trouble themselves about the future when they have nothing to hope from it? The present is all in all in their eyes, and their only interest is individual; the son will take no care of his father’s herd, since it will never come into his possession; he busies himself only with his own affairs and soon turns his thoughts to looking after himself and getting a livelihood. This custom has certainly something to commend it from the moral point of view in so far as it destroys all the motives for that covetousness in heirs which is too often to be seen in our cities. The desire or the hope of a speedy death of their parents cannot exist, since the parents leave absolutely nothing to their children; but on the other hand, if the Patagonians had preserved hereditary properties, they would without doubt have been to-day in possession of numerous herds, and would necessarily have been more formidable to the whites, since their power in that case would have been more than doubled, whereas their present habits will infallibly leave them in a stationary state, from which nothing but a radical change will be able to deliver them.”113.1 Thus poverty, indolence, improvidence, political weakness, and all the hardships of a nomadic life are the miserable inheritance which the fear of the dead entails on these wretched Indians. Heavy indeed is the toll which superstition exacts from all who pass within her gloomy portal.