Note (return) — LECTURE XX

When a certain king of Fiji died, the side of the house was broken down to allow the body to be carried out, though there were doorways wide enough for the purpose close at hand. The missionary who records the fact could not learn the reason of it.729 The custom of taking the dead out of the house by a special opening, which is afterwards closed up, has not been confined to Fiji; on the contrary it has been practised by a multitude of peoples, savage, barbarous, and civilised, in many parts of the world. For example, it was an old Norse rule that a corpse might not be carried out of the house by the door which was used by the living; hence a hole was made in the wall at the back of the dead man's head and he was taken out through it backwards, or a hole was dug in the ground under the south wall and the body was drawn out through it.730 The custom may have been at one time common to all the Aryan or Indo-european peoples, for it is mentioned in other of their ancient records and has been observed by widely separated branches of that great family down to modern times. Thus, the Zend-Avesta prescribes that, when a death has occurred, a breach shall be made in the wall and the corpse carried out through it by two men, who have first stripped off their clothes.731 In Russia "the corpse was often carried out of the house through a window, or through a hole made for the purpose, and the custom is still kept up in many parts."732 Speaking of the Hindoos a French traveller of the eighteenth century says that "instead of carrying the corpse out by the door they make an opening in the wall by which they pass it out in a seated posture, and the hole is closed up after the ceremony."733 Among various Hindoo castes it is still customary, when a death has occurred on an inauspicious day, to remove the corpse from the house not through the door, but through a temporary hole made in the wall.734 Old German law required that the corpses of criminals and suicides should be carried out through a hole under the threshold.735 In the Highlands of Scotland the bodies of suicides were not taken out of the house for burial by the doors, but through an opening made between the wall and the thatch.736