Chapter XIII · FUNERAL RITES.

If I have made clear the corporate character of the clan, or gens, as conceived by savage thought, the reader will have understood how completely the clan is regarded as an unity, literally and not metaphorically one body, the individual members of which are as truly portions as the fingers or the legs are portions of the external, visible body of each of them. We saw in previous chapters that a severed limb, a lock of hair or a nail-clipping, was still regarded as in some invisible but real union with the body whereof it once, in outward appearance also, formed part; and any injury inflicted on the severed portion was inflicted on the bulk. The individual member of a clan was in exactly the same position as a lock of hair cut from the head, or an amputated limb. He had no separate significance, no value apart from his kin. More than that: as we shall see hereafter, injury inflicted on him was inflicted on, and was felt by, the whole kin, just as an injury inflicted on the severed lock or limb was felt by the bulk. This unity of the clan is constantly renewed by the common meal, where the same food is partaken of, and becomes incorporated into the essence of all who share it. In strictness commensal rights belong only to the kin. To eat together means to be of the same flesh and blood, for none others could do so. Such a rule of course came to be modified as soon as hospitality was recognised as a duty or a privilege. But the stranger admitted as a guest to the meal became by that act a temporary member of the kin. The rights conceded to him so long as he remained a guest were the rights of kinship, and entailed corresponding liabilities. He could not, however, share the common meal in its most solemn form, namely, the totem sacrifice, without becoming a blood-brother, and thus entering the kin as a permanent member. In mingling his blood with the blood of the clan, and feeding with them on the totem-animal, he became one with them as much as if he had been already united with them in a common descent. Abandoning his former country and kin and worship, he identified himself with a new organism having a different domicile with different rights and interests and a different cult.

The common meal was thus the pledge and witness of the unity of the kin, because it was the chief means, if not of making, at least of repairing and renewing it. And its importance is emphasised everywhere by its repetition upon every solemn occasion, and by its forming the centre of the entire ritual. This may be taken for granted of many such occasions; but it may seem strange to assign it a position so prominent in some. It is not obvious, for instance, how it can be the most important act of a funeral. The funeral feast, however, is probably universal; and in savage communities it is difficult to overrate its significance. The most archaic form, if barbarity be a test of archaism, in which it is known to us, is where the meat is nothing less than the corpse of the departed kinsman. Cannibalism in any form excites so much horror in civilised mankind that we hesitate to believe it is a stage through which we have all passed. But it is certainly a custom very widely spread and characteristic of a low plane of culture. We cannot, and we need not, now discuss cannibalism in general. Of all the forms it has ever assumed, the most horrible is that of the eating of the bodies of our nearest and dearest; and that is the form we have to consider.

We may dismiss funeral banquets with one further observation. The intention of sharing a common meal with the dead is by no means abandoned at the completion of the funeral ceremonies. The feasts, as in several cases we have already noted, are repeated at intervals. Indeed, at all festivals when the entire kin is assembled the deceased members are conceived as assembled with them; a portion of the food is set aside, a portion of the drink is poured out for the departed. The cult of the dead in this form survives into the higher phases of civilisation. At various times in the year, particularly at Halloween, all over Europe, the tables are set, the doors are opened, and the ghosts are invited to partake of the fare provided by their descendants and relatives; and it is believed that they actually come and enjoy the food prepared for them, and warm themselves on the hearth, which, in the days of their flesh, they used to tend, and around which they used to gather, when work was over, to eat their frugal fare, and to rejoice one another with social converse and the performance of domestic rites. A tender custom! and one that pleads pathetically for its continuance as a witness to a faith in comparison wherewith Christianity is a thing of yesterday, a faith not less true than Christianity itself in its recognition and its consecration of some of the deepest and most vital emotions of our nature.

In the closest connection with wounding and mutilation for the dead, is the cutting, tearing or shaving of the hair. We have already studied gifts of hair to the dead; and if our conclusions as to them be correct, we must also conclude that the cutting or tearing of the hair as an expression of mourning is a relic of that custom which led Hecuba to lay her grey locks upon Hector’s grave and Achilles to bestrew the body of Patroklos with his shorn tresses. Dr. Wilken contends that the intention alike of wounding, of mutilation and of the gift of hair is the dedication of oneself to the dead, a consecration of the entire person, a pledge of ultimate reunion. That it is so in some cases seems clear. But this dedication must in a far greater number of instances be made repeatedly to quite different personages who have stood during life in a variety of relations to the mourner. Where only wives devote their hair to their dead husbands and are not allowed to marry a second time, things would arrange themselves easily in the next world. But if they shed their blood, or shear their locks also for fathers and brothers, for kindred and friends all round—nay, perhaps for another husband or two,—then one would imagine that even savages might anticipate awkward contingencies yonder. The truth is that the practice has sprung from a lower plane of culture than is supposed in a theory of self-dedication and future reunion. We know little of the belief in a future life entertained by the Tasmanian aborigines. From what little we do know it is safe to say that the Tasmanian woman who threw her hair upon the grave of her mother or her child, had no thought of self-consecration to the dead or of meeting again in another world. But she cherished the belief that by means of her hair she could still be in some sort of union with one she had loved. In short, the radical idea of all the practices we have discussed in the present chapter is the same, however much it may be modified with rising civilisation and the gradual evolution of the conception of deity and spirit and the life after death. It is grounded in the conviction of the continued, though mysterious, oneness of a body with its severed parts, and the absence of any conception of spirit apart from a visible and tangible material existence.

Here, though the subject be far from exhausted, we may terminate our inquiry concerning funeral ceremonies based on the conception of sacramental union, on the one side with the survivors, on the other side with the forefathers of the clan. They afford ample evidence that death, as the most solemn and mysterious fact of our existence, has exercised the thoughts of men from the remotest ages. When they arose the idea of a soul or spirit, as distinct from its corporeal tenement, had hardly yet been evolved. Reason, as well as feeling, could do no otherwise than cling to the bodily relics of the dead. And still it clings, even in the highest plane of culture. And still—whatever hopes may linger in the recesses of the mind of reunion, in some brighter and more lasting state of being, with those whom we have loved—we cannot but cherish the relics left to us of their bodily presence and think of the departed as yet about us while we hold these treasures; and there is consolation, albeit a dreary one, in the expectation that when we can hold these treasures no longer, the dust which has been dearest will be that which mingles with our own.