Introduction to the History of Religions Handbooks on the...

32. Theories of a special origination of the soul belong only to the more advanced cults. In early stages of culture the soul is taken as a natural part of the human constitution, and though it is regarded as in a sort an independent entity, the analysis of the man is not carried so far as to raise the question of separate beginnings of the two constituents of the personality, except as this is partially involved in the hypothesis of reincarnation. The child is born into the world equipped with all the capacities of man, and further investigation as to how these capacities originally came is not made.

33. It was, however, thought necessary to account for the appearance of man (a clan or tribe) on earth, and his creation was generally ascribed to a supernatural being. Every tribe has its history of man's creation—the variety in the anthropogonic myths is endless, the diversities depending on the differences of general culture and of surroundings; but the essential point is the same in all; some god or other supernatural Power fashioned human creatures of different sex, whether with well-considered aim or by caprice is not said.

34. The first pair is thus accounted for in a simple and generally satisfactory manner. But the fact of the perpetuation of the tribe or the race appears to have offered serious difficulties to the savage mind. Some tribes are reported to be ignorant of the natural cause of birth. Some Melanesian women believe that the origin or beginning of a child is a plant (coconut or other), and that the child will be the nunu (something like an echo) of that thing or of a dead person (this is not the transition of a soul—the child takes the place of the dead person). In Mota there is a similar belief.53 The Central Australians, it is said, think that the birth of a child is due to the entrance of a spirit into the body of a woman54—every child is thus the reincarnation of some ancient person (an "ancestor"), and the particular person is identified by the sacred object (stone or tree, or other object) near which the woman is when she first becomes aware of the child within her; every such object (and there are many of them near any village) represents some spirit whose name is known to the old men of the tribe, and this name is given the child.55

35. Similar theories of birth are found among the Eskimo56 and the Khonds,57 in Melanesia,58 in West Africa,59 and elsewhere.60 Such views thus appear to have been widely diffused, and are in fact a natural product of early biological science. They embody the earliest known form of the doctrine of reincarnation, which is so important in the Buddhistic dogma.61 With it must be connected the fact that among many peoples (savage, half-civilized, and civilized) birth was intimately connected with supernatural beings, whence the origin of numerous usages: the precautions taken to guard the woman before delivery, the lustrations after the birth, the couvade, the dread of menstrual and seminal discharges, and further, customs relating to the arrival of boys and girls at the age of puberty.

36. At a later stage of culture the creation of the soul was distinguished from that of the body, and was generally regarded as a special act of the deity: the Hebrews conceived that the body was fashioned out of dust, and that the breath of life was breathed into it by God, so that man became a "living soul"62; Plato at one time63 thought that the soul of the world was created by God, out of certain elements, before the body, and was made prior to it in origin and excellence so that it should be its ruler, and that afterwards he placed separate souls in the various separate bodies; the immortal gods, says Cicero, have placed souls (animos) in human bodies, and the human soul has been plucked (decerptus) from the divine mind.64

37. In the early Christian centuries the question of how the soul came into the body was an intensely practical one—it was closely connected with the question of man's inherent sinfulness and his capacity for redemption. Tertullian's theory of the natural propagation of souls (traducianism), which involved the inheritance of a sinful nature, was succeeded on the one hand by the theory of preëxistence (adopted by Origen from Plato), and on the other hand by the view that every soul was an immediate creation of God (creationism, held by Jerome and others), these both assuming the natural goodness or untainted character of the soul at the birth of the human being.

38. The mysterious character of death, the final departure of the soul from the body, called forth in savage communities feelings of awe and dread. As death, in the savage view, was due to the intervention of a supernatural agency, the dead body and everything connected with it partook of the sacredness that attached to the supernatural.65 Hence, probably, many of the customs relating to the treatment of corpses—taboos that survived into comparatively late times.66 The Old Testament ritual term 'unclean' is used of corpses and other things that it was unlawful to touch, things taboo, and in this sense is equivalent to 'sacred.'67