Primitive culture, vol. 1 (of 2)

And thus it is a habitual feature of the ghost-stories of the civilized, as of the savage world, that the ghost comes dressed, and even dressed in well-known clothing worn in life. Hearing as well as sight testifies to the phantoms of objects: the clanking of ghostly chains and the rustling of ghostly dresses are described in the literature of apparitions. Now by the savage theory, according to which the ghost and his clothes are alike real and objective, and by the modern scientific theory, according to which both ghost and garment are alike imaginary and subjective, the facts of apparitions are rationally met. But the modern vulgar who ignore or repudiate the notion of ghosts of things, while retaining the notion of ghosts of persons, have fallen into a hybrid state of opinion which has neither the logic of the savage nor of the civilized philosopher.

Among the lower races of mankind, three have been observed to hold most explicitly and distinctly the doctrine of object-souls. These are the Algonquin tribes, extending over a great district of North America, the islanders of the Fijian group, and the Karens of Burma. Among the Indians of North America, Father Charlevoix wrote, souls are, as it were, the shadows and the animated images of the body, and it is by a consequence of this principle that they believe everything to be animate in the universe. This missionary was especially conversant with the Algonquins, and it was among one of their tribes, the Ojibwas, that Keating noticed the opinion that not only men and beasts have souls, but inorganic things, such as kettles, &c., have in them a similar essence. In the same district Father Le Jeune had described, in the seventeenth century, the belief that the souls, not only of men and animals, but of hatchets and kettles, had to cross the water to the Great Village, out where the sun sets.[785] In interesting correspondence with this quaint thought is Mariner’s description of the Fiji doctrine—‘If an animal or a plant die, its soul immediately goes to Bolotoo; if a stone or any other substance is broken, immortality is equally its reward; nay, artificial bodies have equal good luck with men, and hogs, and yams. If an axe or a chisel is worn out or broken up, away flies its soul for the service of the gods.

If a house is taken down or any way destroyed, its immortal part will find a situation on the plains of Bolotoo; and, to confirm this doctrine, the Fiji people can show you a sort of natural well, or deep hole in the ground, at one of their islands, across the bottom of which runs a stream of water, in which you may clearly perceive the souls of men and women, beasts and plants, of stocks and stones, canoes and houses, and of all the broken utensils of this frail world, swimming, or rather tumbling along one over the other pell-mell into the regions of immortality.’ A full generation later the Rev. Thomas Williams, while remarking that the escape of brutes and lifeless substances to the spirit-land of Mbulu does not receive universal credit among the Fijians, nevertheless confirms the older account of it:—‘Those who profess to have seen the souls of canoes, houses, plants, pots, or any artificial bodies, swimming with other relics of this frail world on the stream of the Kauvandra well, which bears them into the regions of immortality, believe this doctrine as a matter of course; and so do those who have seen the footmarks left about the same well by the ghosts of dogs, pigs, &c.’[786] The theory among the Karens is stated by the Rev. E. B. Cross, as follows:—‘Every object is supposed to have its “kelah.” Axes and knives, as well as trees and plants, are supposed to have their separate “kelahs.”’ ‘The Karen, with his axe and cleaver, may build his house, cut his rice, and conduct his affairs, after death as before.’[787]

As so many races perform funeral sacrifices of men and animals, in order to dispatch their souls for the service of the soul of the deceased, so tribes who hold this doctrine of object-souls very rationally sacrifice objects, in order to transmit these souls. Among the Algonquin tribes, the sacrifice of objects for the dead was a habitual rite, as when we read of a warrior’s corpse being buried with musket and war-club, calumet and war-paint, and a public address being made to the body at burial concerning his future path; while in like manner a woman would be buried with her paddle and kettle, and the carrying-strap for the everlasting burden of her heavily-laden life. That the purpose of such offerings is the transmission of the object’s spirit or phantom to the possession of the man’s is explicitly stated as early as 1623 by Father Lallemant; when the Indians buried kettles, furs, &c., with the dead, they said that the bodies of the things remained, but their souls went to the dead who used them. The whole idea is graphically illustrated in the following Ojibwa tradition or myth. Gitchi Gauzini was a chief who lived on the shores of Lake Superior, and once, after a few days’ illness, he seemed to die. He had been a skilful hunter, and had desired that a fine gun which he possessed should be buried with him when he died. But some of his friends not thinking him really dead, his body was not buried; his widow watched him for four days, he came back to life, and told his story.

After death, he said, his ghost travelled on the broad road of the dead toward the happy land, passing over great plains of luxuriant herbage, seeing beautiful groves, and hearing the songs of innumerable birds, till at last, from the summit of a hill, he caught sight of the distant city of the dead, far across an intermediate space, partly veiled in mist, and spangled with glittering lakes and streams. He came in view of herds of stately deer and moose, and other game, which with little fear walked near his path. But he had no gun, and remembering how he had requested his friends to put his gun in his grave, he turned back to go and fetch it. Then he met face to face the train of men, women, and children who were travelling toward the city of the dead. They were heavily laden with guns, pipes, kettles, meats, and other articles; women were carrying basket-work and painted paddles, and little boys had their ornamented clubs and their bows and arrows, the presents of their friends. Refusing a gun which an overburdened traveller offered him, the ghost of Gitchi Gauzini travelled back in quest of his own, and at last reached the place where he had died. There he could see only a great fire before and around him, and finding the flames barring his passage on every side, he made a desperate leap through, and awoke from his trance. Having concluded his story, he gave his auditors this counsel, that they should no longer deposit so many burdensome things with the dead, delaying them on their journey to the place of repose, so that almost everyone he met complained bitterly.

With purpose no less distinct, when a dead Fijian chief is laid out oiled and painted and dressed as in life, a heavy club is placed ready near his right hand, which holds one or more of the much-prized carved ‘whale’s tooth’ ornaments. The club is to serve for defence against the adversaries who await his soul on the road to Mbulu, seeking to slay and eat him. We hear of a Fijian taking a club from a companion’s grave, and remarking in explanation to a missionary who stood by, ‘The ghost of the club has gone with him.’ The purpose of the whale’s tooth is this; on the road to the land of the dead, near the solitary hill of Takiveleyawa, there stands a ghostly pandanus-tree, and the spirit of the dead man is to throw the spirit of the whale’s tooth at this tree, having struck which he is to ascend the hill and await the coming of the spirits of his strangled wives.[789] The funeral rites of the Karens complete the present group. They kept up what seems a clear survival from actual human and animal sacrifice, fastening up near an important person’s grave a slave and a pony; these invariably released themselves, and the slave became henceforth a free man. Moreover, the practice of placing food, implements and utensils, and valuables of gold and silver, near the remains of the deceased, was general among them.[790]

Now the sacrifice of property for the dead is one of the great religious rites of the world; are we then justified in asserting that all men who abandon or destroy property as a funeral ceremony believe the articles to have spirits, which spirits are transmitted to the deceased? Not so; it is notorious that there are people who recognize no such theory but who nevertheless deposit offerings with the dead. Affectionate fancy or symbolism, a horror of the association of death leading the survivors to get rid of anything that even suggests the dreadful thought, a desire to abandon the dead man’s property, an idea that the hovering ghost may take pleasure in or make use of the gifts left for him, all these are or may be efficient motives.[791] Yet, having made full allowance for all this, we shall find good reason to judge that many other peoples, though they may never have stated the theory of object-souls in the same explicit way as the Algonquins, Fijians, and Karens, have recognized it with more or less distinctness. It has given me the more confidence in this opinion to find it held, under proper reservation, by Mr. W. R. Alger, an American investigator, who in a treatise entitled ‘A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life’ has discussed the ethnography of his subject with remarkable learning and sagacity. ‘The barbarian brain,’ he writes, ‘seems to have been generally impregnated with the feeling that everything else has a ghost as well as man....

The custom of burning or burying things with the dead probably arose, in some cases at least, from the supposition that every object, has its manes.’[792] It will be desirable briefly to examine further the subject of funeral offerings, as bearing on this interesting question of early psychology.

A wide survey of funeral sacrifices over the world will plainly show one of their most usual motives to be a more or less defined notion of benefiting the deceased, whether out of kindness to him or from fear of his displeasure. How such an intention may have taken this practical shape we can perhaps vaguely guess, familiar as we are with a state of mind out of which funeral sacrifices could naturally have sprung. The man is dead, but it is still possible to fancy him alive, to take his cold hand, to speak to him, to place his chair at the table, to bury suggestive mementoes in his coffin, to throw flowers into his grave, to hang wreaths of everlastings on his tomb. The Cid may be set on Babieca with his sword Tizona in his hand, and carried out to do battle as of old against the unbeliever; the dead king’s meal may be carried in to him in state, although the chamberlain must announce that the king does not dine to-day. Such childlike ignoring of death, such childlike make-believe that the dead can still do as heretofore, may well have led the savage to bury with his kinsman the weapons, clothes, and ornaments that he used in life, to try to feed the corpse, to put a cigar in the mouth of the skull before its final burial, to lay playthings in the infant’s grave. But one thought beyond would carry this dim blind fancy into the range of logical reasoning.

Granted that the man is dead and his soul gone out of him, then the way to provide that departed soul with food or clothes or weapons is to bury or burn them with the body, for whatever happens to the man may be taken to happen to the objects that lie beside him and share his fate, while the precise way in which the transmission takes place may be left undecided. It is possible that the funeral sacrifice customary among mankind may have rested at first, and may to some extent still rest, on vague thoughts and imaginations like these, as yet fitted into no more definite and elaborate philosophic theory.

There are, however, two great groups of cases of funeral sacrifice, which so logically lead up to or involve the notion of souls or spirits of objects, that the sacrificer himself could hardly answer otherwise a point-blank question as to their meaning. The first group is that in which those who sacrifice men and beasts with the intention of conveying their souls to the other world, also sacrifice lifeless things indiscriminately with them. The second group is that in which the phantoms of the objects sacrificed are traced distinctly into the possession of the human phantom.

The Caribs, holding that after decease man’s soul found its way to the land of the dead, sacrificed slaves on a chief’s grave to serve him in the new life, and for the same purpose buried dogs with him, and also weapons.[793] The Guinea negroes, at the funeral of a great man, killed several wives and slaves to serve him in the other world, and put fine clothes, gold fetishes, coral, beads, and other valuables, into the coffin, to be used there too.[794] When the New Zealand chief had slaves killed at his death for his service, and the mourning family gave his chief widow a rope to hang herself with in the woods and so rejoin her husband,[795] it is not easy to discern here a motive different from that which induced them at the same time to provide the dead man also with his weapons. Nor can an intellectual line well be drawn between the intentions with which the Tunguz has buried with him his horse, his bow and arrows, his smoking apparatus and kettle. In the typical description which Herodotus gives of the funeral of the ancient Scythian chiefs, the miscellaneous contents of the burial-mound, the strangled wife and household servants, the horses, the choice articles of property, the golden vessels, fairly represent the indiscriminate purpose which actuated the barbaric sacrifice of creatures and things.[796] So in old Europe, the warrior with his sword and spear, the horse with his saddle, the hunter’s hound and hawk and his bow and arrow, the wife with her gay clothes and jewels, lie together in the burial-mound.

As for what becomes of the objects sacrificed for the dead there are on record the most distinct statements taken from the sacrificers themselves. Although the objects rot in the grave or are consumed on the pile, they nevertheless come in some way into the possession of the disembodied souls they are intended for. Not the material things themselves, but phantasmal shapes corresponding to them, are carried by the souls of the dead on their far journey beyond the grave, or are used in the world of spirits; while sometimes the phantoms of the dead appear to the living, bearing property which they have received by sacrifice, or demanding something that has been withheld. The Australian will take his weapons with him to his paradise.[797] A Tasmanian, asked the reason of a spear being deposited in a native’s grave, replied ‘To fight with when he is asleep.’[798] Many Greenlanders thought that the kayak and arrows and tools laid by a man’s grave, the knife and sewing implements laid by a woman’s, would be used in the next world.[799] The instruments buried with the Sioux are for him to make a living with hereafter; the paints provided for the dead Iroquois were to enable him to appear decently in the other world.[800] The Aztec’s water-bottle was to serve him on the journey to Mictlan, the land of the dead; the bonfire of garments and baskets and spoils of war was intended to send them with him, and somehow to protect him against the bitter wind; the offerings to the warrior’s manes on earth would reach him on the heavenly plains.[801] Among the old Peruvians, a dead prince’s

wives would hang themselves in order to continue in his service, and many of his attendants would be buried in his fields or places of favourite resort, in order that his soul, passing through those places, might take their souls along with him for future service. In perfect consistency with these strong animistic notions, the Peruvians declared that their reason for sacrifice of property to the dead was that they ‘have seen, or thought they saw, those who have long been dead walking, adorned with the things that were buried with them, and accompanied by their wives who had been buried alive.’[802]

As definite an implication of the spirit or phantom of an object appears in a recent account from Madagascar, where things are buried to become in some way useful to the dead. When King Radama died, it was reported and firmly believed that his ghost was seen one night in the garden of his country seat, dressed in one of the uniforms which had been buried with him, and riding one of the best horses killed opposite his tomb.[803] Turanian tribes of North Asia avow that the motive of their funeral offerings of horses and sledges, clothes and axes and kettles, flint and steel and tinder, meat and butter, is to provide the dead for his journey to the land of souls, and for his life there.[804] Among the Esths of Northern Europe, the dead starts properly equipped on his ghostly journey with needle and thread, hairbrush and soap, bread and brandy and coin; a toy, if it is a child.

And so full a consciousness of practical meaning survived till lately, that now and then a soul would come back at night to reproach its relations with not having provided properly for it, but left it in distress.[805] To turn from these now Europeanized Tatars to a rude race of the Eastern Archipelago, among the Orang Binua of Sambawa there prevails this curious law of inheritance; not only does each surviving relative, father, mother, son, brother, and so forth, take his or her proper share, but the deceased inherits one share from himself, which is devoted to his use by eating the animals at the funeral feast, burning everything else that will burn, and burying the remainder.[806] In Cochin China, the common people object to celebrating their feast of the dead on the same day with the upper classes, for this excellent reason, that the aristocratic souls might make the servant souls carry home their presents for them. These people employ all the resources of their civilization to perform with the more lavish extravagance the savage funeral sacrifices. Here are details from an account published in 1849 of the funeral of a late king of Cochin China. ‘When the corpse of Thien Tri was deposited in the coffin, there were also deposited in it many things for the use of the deceased in the other world, such as his crown, turbans, clothes of all descriptions, gold, silver, and other precious articles, rice and other provisions.’ Meals were set out near the coffin, and there was a framed piece of damask with woollen characters, the abode of one of the souls of the defunct.

In the tomb, an enclosed edifice of stone, the childless wives of the deceased were to be perpetually shut up to guard the sepulchre, ‘and prepare daily the food and other things of which they think the deceased has need in the other life.’ At the time of the deposit of the coffin in a cavern behind the tomb building, there were burnt there great piles of boats, stages, and everything used in the funeral, ‘and moreover of all the objects which had been in use by the king during his lifetime, of chessmen, musical instruments, fans, boxes, parasols, mats, fillets, carriages, &c., &c., and likewise a horse and an elephant of wood and pasteboard.’ ‘Some months after the funeral, at two different times, there were constructed in a forest near a pagoda two magnificent palaces of wood with rich furnishings, in all things similar to the palace which the defunct monarch had inhabited. Each palace was composed of twenty rooms, and the most scrupulous attention was given in order that nothing might be awanting necessary for a palace, and these palaces were burned with great pomp, and it is thus that immense riches have been given to the flames from the foolish belief that it would serve the dead in the other world.’[807]

Though the custom is found among the Beduins of arraying the dead with turban, girdle, and sword, yet funeral offerings for the service of the dead are by no means conspicuous among Semitic nations. The mention of the rite by Ezekiel, while showing a full sense of its meaning, characterizes it as not Israelite, but Gentile: ‘The mighty fallen of the uncircumcised, which are gone down to Hades with weapons of war, and they have laid their swords under their heads.’[808] Among the Aryan nations, on the contrary, such funeral offerings are known to have prevailed widely and of old, while for picturesqueness of rite and definiteness of purpose they can scarcely be surpassed even among savages. Why the Brahman’s sacrificial instruments are to be burnt with him on the funeral pile, appears from this line of the Veda recited at the ceremony: ‘Yadâ gachâhatyasunîtimetâmathâ devânâm vasanîrbhavâti,’—‘When he cometh unto that life, faithfully will he do the service of the gods.’[809] Lucian is sarcastic, but scarcely unfair, in his comments on the Greek funeral rites, speaking of those who slew horses and slave-girls and cupbearers, and burned or buried clothes and ornaments, as for use and service in the world below; of the meat and drink offerings on the tombs which serve to feed the bodiless shades in Hades; of the splendid garments and the garlands of the dead, that they might not suffer cold upon the road, nor be seen naked by Kerberos.

For Kerberos was intended the honey-cake deposited with the dead; and the obolus placed in the mouth was the toll for Charon, save at Hermione in Argolis, where men thought there was a short descent to Hades, and therefore provided the dead with no coin for the grim ferryman. How such ideas could be realized, may be seen in the story of Eukrates, whose dead wife appeared to him to demand one of her golden sandals, which had been dropped underneath the chest, and so not burnt for her with the rest of her wardrobe; or in the story of Periander, whose dead wife Melissa refused to give him an oracular response, for she was shivering and naked, because the garments buried with her had not been burnt, and so were of no use, wherefore Periander plundered the Corinthian women of their best clothes, which he burned in a great trench with prayer, and now obtained his answer.[810] The ancient Gauls were led, by their belief in another life, to burn and bury with the dead things suited to the living; nor is the record improbable that they transferred to the world below the repayment of loans, for even in modern centuries the Japanese would borrow money in this life, to be repaid with heavy interest in the next.[811] The souls of the Norse dead took with them from their earthly home servants and horses, boats and ferry-money, clothes and weapons. Thus, in death as in life, they journeyed, following the long dark ‘hell-way’ (helvegr).

The ‘hell-shoon’ (helskó) were bound upon the dead man’s feet for the toilsome journey; and when King Harald was slain in the battle of Bravalla, they drove his war-chariot, with the corpse upon it into the great burial-mound, and there they killed the horse, and King Hring gave his own saddle beside, that the fallen chief might ride or drive to Walhalla, as it pleased him.[812] Lastly, in the Lithuanian and old Prussian district, where Aryan heathendom held its place in Europe so firmly and so late, accounts of funeral sacrifice of men, and beasts, and things, date on even beyond the middle ages. Even as they thought that men would live again in the resurrection rich or poor, noble or peasant, as on earth, so ‘they believed that the things burned would rise again with them, and serve them as before.’ Among these people lived the Kriwe Kriweito, the great priest, whose house was on the high steep mountain Anafielas. All the Souls of their dead must clamber up this mountain, wherefore they burned with them claws of bears and lynxes for their help. All the souls must pass through the Kriwe’s house, and he could describe to the surviving relatives of each the clothes, and horse, and weapons he had seen him come with, and even show, for greater certainty, some mark made with lance or other instrument by the passing soul.[813] Such examples of funeral rites show a common ceremony, and to a great degree a common purpose, obtaining from savagery through barbarism, and even into the higher civilization.

Now could we have required from all these races a distinct answer to the question, whether they believed in spirits of all things, from men and beasts down to spears and cloaks, sticks and stones, it is likely that we might have often received the same acknowledgment of fully developed animism which stands on record in North America, Polynesia, and Burma. Failing such direct testimony, it is at least justifiable to say that the lower culture, by practically dealing with object-souls, goes far towards acknowledging their existence.

Before quitting the discussion of funeral offerings for transmission to the dead, the custom must be traced to its final decay. It is apt not to die out suddenly, but to leave surviving remnants, more or less dwindled in form and changed in meaning. The Kanowits of Borneo talk of setting a man’s property adrift for use in the next world, and even go so far as to lay out his valuables by the bier, but in fact they only commit to the frail canoe a few old things not worth plundering.[814] So in North America, the funeral sacrifice of the Winnebagos has come down to burying a pipe and tobacco with the dead, and sometimes a club in a warrior’s grave, while the goods brought and hung up at the burial-place are no longer left there, but the survivors gamble for them.[815] The Santals of Bengal put two vessels, one for rice and the other for water, on the dead man’s couch, with a few rupees, to enable him to appease the demons on the threshold of the shadowy world, but when the funeral pile is ready these things are removed.[816] The fanciful art of replacing costly offerings by worthless imitations is at this day worked out into the quaintest devices in China. As the men and horses dispatched by fire for the service of the dead are but paper figures, so offerings of clothes and money may be represented likewise.

The imitations of Spanish pillar-dollars in pasteboard covered with tinfoil, the sheets of tinfoil-paper which stand for silver money, and if coloured yellow for gold, are consumed in such quantities that the sham becomes a serious reality, for the manufacture of mock-money is the trade of thousands of women and children in a Chinese city. In a similar way trunks full of property are forwarded in the care of the newly deceased, to friends who are gone before. Pretty paper houses, ‘replete with every luxury,’ as our auctioneers say, are burnt for the dead Chinaman to live in hereafter, and the paper keys are burnt also, that he may unfasten the paper locks of the paper chests that hold the ingots of gold-paper and silver-paper, which are to be realized as current gold and silver in the other world, an idea which, however, does not prevent the careful survivors from collecting the ashes to re-extract the tin from them in this.[817] Again, when the modern Hindu offers to his dead parent funeral cakes with flowers and betel, he presents a woollen yam which he lays across the cake, and naming the deceased says, ‘May this apparel, made of woollen yam, be acceptable to thee.’[818] Such facts as these suggest a symbolic meaning in the practically useless offerings which Sir John Lubbock groups together—the little models of kayaks and spears in Esquimaux graves, the models of objects in Egyptian tombs, and the flimsy unserviceable jewelry buried with the Etruscan dead.[819]

Just as people in Borneo, after they had become Mohammedans, still kept up the rite of burying provisions for the dead man’s journey, as a mark of respect,[820] so the rite of interring funeral offerings survived in Christian Europe. The ancient Greek burial of the dead with the obolus in his mouth for Charon’s toll is represented in the modern Greek world, where Charon and the funeral coin are both familiar. As the old Prussians furnished the dead with spending-money to buy refreshment on his weary journey, so to this day German peasants bury a corpse with money in his mouth or hand, a fourpenny-piece or so. Similar little funeral offerings of coin are recorded in the folklore books elsewhere in Europe.[821] Christian funeral offerings of this kind are mostly trifling in value, and doubtful as to the meaning with which they were kept up. The early Christians retained the heathen custom of placing in the tomb such things as articles of the toilette and children’s playthings; modern Greeks would place oars on a shipman’s grave, and other such tokens for other crafts; the beautiful classic rite of scattering flowers over the dead still holds its place in Europe.[822] Whatever may have been the thoughts which first prompted these kindly ceremonies, they were thoughts belonging to far præ-Christian ages.

The change of sacrifice from its early significance is shown among the Hindus, who have turned it to account for purposes of priestcraft: he who gives water or shoes to a Brahman will find water to refresh him, and shoes to wear, on the journey to the next world, while the gift of a present house will secure him a future palace.[823] In interesting correspondence with this, is a transition from pagan to Christian folklore in our own land. The Lyke-Wake Dirge, the not yet forgotten funeral chant of the North Country, tells, like some savage or barbaric legend, of the passage over the Bridge of Death and the dreadful journey to the other world. But though the ghostly traveller’s feet are still shod with the old Norseman’s hell-shoon, he gains them no longer by funeral offering, but by his own charity in life:—