Chapter 5

What underlies this idea that by man alone is death brought into the world is that death is unnatural and is no part of the original design of things. When the fact comes to be recognised undeniably that deaths not caused by human agency do take place, then the fact requires explanation; and the explanation on which primitive races, quite independently of each other, hit is that as death was no part of the original design of things, its introduction was due to accident or mistake. Either men were originally exempt from death, or they were intended to be exempt. If they were intended to be exempt, then the inference drawn is that the intention was frustrated by the carelessness of the agent intrusted with the duty of making men deathless. If they were originally exempt from death, then the loss of the exemption has to be accounted for. And in either case the explanation takes the form of a narrative which relates how the mistake took place or what event it was that caused the loss of the exemption. I need not quote examples of either class of narrative. What I wish to do is to emphasise the fact that by primitive man death is felt to be inconsistent with the {47} scheme of things. First, therefore, he denies that it can come in the course of nature, though he admits that it may be procured by the wicked man in the way of murder or magic. And it is at this stage that his hope of reunion with those loved and lost scarcely stretches beyond the prospect of their return to this world. Evidence of this stage is found partly in tales such as those told of the mother who returns to revisit her child, or of persons restored to life. Stories of this latter kind come from Tasmania, Australia, and Samoa, amongst other places, and are found amongst the Eskimo and American Indians, as well as amongst the Fjorts (J. A. MacCullough, _The Childhood of Fiction_, ch. IV). Even more direct evidence of the emotion which prompts these stories is afforded by the Ho dirge, quoted by Professor Tylor (_P. C._, II, 32, 33):--

"We never scolded you; never wronged you; Come to us back! We ever loved and cherished you; and have lived long together Under the same roof; Desert it not now! The rainy nights and the cold blowing days are coming on; Do not wander here! Do not stand by the burnt ashes; come to us again! You cannot find shelter under the peepul, when the rain comes down.

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The saul will not shield you from the cold bitter wind. Come to your home! It is swept for you and clean; and we are there who loved you ever; And there is rice put for you and water; Come home, come home, come to us again!"

In these verses it is evident that the death of the body is recognised as a fact. It is even more manifest that the death of the body is put aside as weighing for naught against the absolute conviction that the loved one still exists. But reunion is sought in this world; another world is not yet thought of. The next world has not yet been called into existence to redress the sorrows and the sufferings of this life. Where the discovery of that solution has not been made, the human mind seeks such consolation as may be found elsewhere. If the aspiration, "come to us, come to us again," can find no other realisation, it welcomes the reappearance of the lost one in another form. In Australia, amongst the Euahlayi tribe, the mother who has lost her baby or her young child may yet believe that it is restored to her and born again in the form of another child. In West Africa, according to Miss Kingsley, "the new babies as they arrived in the family were shown a selection of small articles belonging to deceased members whose souls {49} were still absent,--the thing the child caught hold of identified him. 'Why, he's Uncle John; see! he knows his own pipe;' or 'That's Cousin Emma; see! she knows her market calabash;' and so on." But it is not only amongst Australian black fellows or West African negroes that the attempt is made to extract consolation for death from the speculation that we die only to be reborn in this world. The theory of rebirth is put forward by a distinguished student of Hegel--Dr. McTaggart--in a work entitled _Some Dogmas of Religion_. It is admitted by Dr. McTaggart to be true that we have no memory whatever of our previous stages of existence; but he declares, "we may say that, in spite of the loss of memory, it is the same person who lives in the successive lives" (p. 130); and he appears to find the same consolation as his remote forefathers did in looking forward to a future stage of existence in which he will have no more memory of his present existence, and no more reason to believe in it, than he now has memory of, or reason to believe in, his preëxistence. "It is certain," he says, "that in this life we remember no previous lives," and he accepts the position that it is equally certain we shall have in our next life absolutely no memory of our {50} present existence. That, of course, distinguishes Dr. McTaggart from the West African Uncle John who, when he is reborn, at any rate "knows his own pipe."

The human mind, as I have said, seeks such consolation as it may find in the doctrine of rebirth. It finds evidence of rebirth either in the behaviour of the new-born child or in its resemblance to deceased relations. But it also comes to the conclusion that the reincarnation may be in animal form. Whether that conclusion is suggested by the strangely human expression in the eyes of some animals, or whether it is based upon the belief in the power of transformation, need not be discussed. It is beyond doubt that transformation is believed in: the Cherokee Indian sings a verse to the effect that he becomes a real wolf; and "after stating that he has become a real wolf, the songster utters a prolonged howl, and paws the ground like a wolf with his feet" (Frazer, _Kingship_, p. 71). Indeed, identity may be attained or manifested without any process of transformation; in Australia, amongst the Dieri tribe, the head man of a totem consisting of a particular sort of a seed is spoken of by his people as being the plant itself which yields the seed (_ib._, p. 109). {51} Where such beliefs are prevalent, the doctrine of the reincarnation of the soul in animal form will obviously arise at the stage of evolution which we are now discussing, that is to say when the soul is not yet supposed to depart to another world, and must therefore manifest itself in this world in one way or another, if not in human shape, then in animal form. In the form of what animal the deceased will be reincarnated is a question which will be answered in different ways. Purely fortuitous circumstances may lead to particular animals being considered to be the reincarnation of the deceased. Or the fact that the deceased has a particular animal for totem may lead the survivors to expect his reappearance in the form of that particular animal. The one fact of importance for our present purpose is that at its origin the belief in animal reincarnation had no necessary connection with the theory of future punishments and rewards. At the stage of evolution in which the belief in transmigration arose many animals were the object of genuine respect because of the virtues of courage, etc., which were manifested by them; or because of the position they occupied as totems. Consequently no loss of status was involved when the soul transmigrated from a {52} human to an animal form. No notion of punishment was involved in the belief.

The doctrines of reincarnation and transmigration belong to a stage in the evolution of belief, or to a system of thought, in which the conviction that the death of the body does not entail the destruction of the soul is undoubted, but from which the conception, indeed the very idea, of another world than this is excluded. That conception begins to manifest itself where ancestor worship establishes itself; but the manifestation is incomplete. Deceased chieftains and heroes, who have been benefactors to the tribe, are remembered; and the good they did is remembered also. They are themselves remembered as the doers of good; and their spirits are naturally conceived as continuing to be benevolent, or ready to confer benefits when properly approached. But thus envisaged, they are seen rather in their relation to the living than in their relation to each other. It is their assistance in this world that is sought; their condition in the next world is of less practical importance and therefore provokes less of speculation, in the first instance. But when speculation is provoked, it proves ultimately fatal to ancestor worship.

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First, it may lead to the question of the relation of the spirits of the deceased benefactors to the god or gods of the community. There will be a tendency to blur the distinction between the god and his worshippers, if any of the worshippers come to be regarded as being after death spirits from whom aid may be invoked and to whom offerings must be made. And if the distinction ceases after death, it is difficult and sometimes impossible to maintain it during life; an emperor who is to be deified after death may find his deification beginning before his death. Belief in such deification may be accepted by some members of the community. Others will regard it as proof that religion is naught; and yet others will be driven to seek for a form of religion which affords no place for such deifications, but maintains explicitly that distinction between a god and his worshippers which is present in the most rudimentary forms of religion.

But though the tendency of ancestor worship is to run this course and to pass in this way out of the evolution of religion, it may be arrested at the very outset, if the religious spirit is, as it has been in one case at least, strong enough to stand against it at the beginning. Thus, amongst the Jews there {54} was a tendency to ancestor worship, as is shown by the fact of its prohibition. But it was stamped out; and it was stamped out so effectually that belief in the continued existence of the soul after death ceased for long to have any practical influence. "Generally speaking, the Hebrews regarded the grave as the final end of all sentient and intelligent existence, 'the land where all things are forgotten'" (Smith's _Dictionary of the Bible_, _s.v._ Sheol). "In death," the Psalmist says to the Lord, "there is no remembrance of thee: in Sheol who shall give thee thanks?" "Shall they that are deceased arise and praise thee? Shall thy loving-kindness be declared in the grave?" or "thy righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?" Thus the Sheol of the Old Testament remains to testify to the view taken of the state of the dead by a people amongst whom the worship of ancestors was arrested at the outset. Amongst such a people the dead are supposed simply to continue in the next world as they left this: "in Sheol the kings of the nations have their thrones, and the mighty their weapons of war," just as in Virgil the ghost of Deiphobus still shows the ghastly wounds by which he perished (Jevons, _History of Religion_, p. 301).

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This continuation theory, the view that the dead continue in the next world as they left this, means that, to the people who entertain it, the dead are merely a memory. It is forbidden to think of them as doing anything, as affecting the living in any way. They are conceived as powerless to gratify the wishes of the living, or to thwart them. Where the Lord God is a jealous God, religion cannot tolerate the idea that any other spirit should be conceived as usurping His functions, still less that such spirits should receive the offerings and the prayers which are the due of Him alone. But though the dead are thus reduced to a mere memory, the memory itself does not and cannot die. Accordingly the dead, or rather those whose bodies are dead, continue to live. But, as they exercise no action in, or control over, the world of the living, their place of abode comes to be regarded as another world, to which they are confined. Speculation, therefore, where speculation is made, as to the case of the inhabitants of this other world, must take the direction of enquiring as to their fate. Where speculation is not made, the dead are conceived merely to continue to be as they are remembered to have been in this life. But, if there is to be room for any speculation {56} at all, there must be assumed to be some diversity in their fate, and therefore some reason, intelligible to man, for that diversity. That is a conclusion to which tribes attain who have apparently gone through no period of ancestor worship,--indeed, ancestor worship only impedes or defers the attainment of that conclusion. The diversity of fate could only consist in the difference between being where you would be and being where you would not. But the reasons for that diversity may be very different amongst different peoples. First, where religion is at its lowest or is in its least developed form, the gods are not the cause of the diversity nor do they seem concerned in it. Such diversity as there is seems in its simplest form merely to be a continuance of the social distinctions which prevail among the living: the high chieftains rest in a calm, plenteous, sunny land in the sky; while "all Indians of low degree go deep down under the earth to the land of Chay-her, with its poor houses and no salmon and no deer, and blankets so small and thin, that when the dead are buried the friends often bury blankets with them" (Tylor, _P. C._, II, 85). Elsewhere, it is not social distinctions, but moral, that make the difference: "the rude Tupinambas of Brazil think {57} the souls of such as had lived virtuously, that is to say who have well avenged themselves and eaten many of their enemies," (_ib._) rejoin the souls of their fathers in the happy land, while the cowards go to the other place. Thus, though the distinctions in the next world do not seem originally to have sprung from or to have been connected with morality, and still less with religion, they are, or may be at a very early period, seized upon by the moral consciousness as containing truth or implying it, when rightly understood. Truth indeed of the highest import for morality is implied in the distinctions thus essayed to be drawn. But before the truth implicit could be made explicit, it was necessary that the distinctions should be recognised to have their basis in religion. And that was impossible where religion was at its lowest or in its least developed form.

From the fact that on the one hand the conception of a future life in another world, when it arose amongst people in a low stage of religious development, bore but little moral and no religious fruit; and on the other, where it did yield fruit, there had been a previous period when religion closed its eyes as far as possible to the condition of the dead {58} in Hades or in Sheol,--we may draw the inference that the conception of the future state formed by such people, as "the rude Tupinambas of Brazil" had to be sterilised, so to speak,--to be purified from associations dangerous both to morality and religion. We may fairly say that as a matter of fact that was the consequence which actually happened, and that both in Greece and Judæa the prospect of a future life at one time became practically a _tabula rasa_ on which might be written a fairer message of hope than had ever been given before. In Greece the message was written, indeed, and was received with hope by the thousands who joined in the celebration of the mysteries. But the characters in which it was written faded soon. The message was found to reveal nothing. It revealed nothing because it demanded nothing. It demanded neither a higher life nor a higher conception of the deity. It did not set forth a new and nobler morality; and it accommodated itself to the existing polytheism. What it did do was to familiarise the Hellenic world with the conviction that there was a life hereafter, better than this life; and that the condition of its attainment was communion with the true God, peradventure He could be found. It was by this {59} conviction and this expectation that the ground was prepared, wherever Hellenism existed, for the message that was to come from Israel.

From the beginning, or let us say in the lowest forms in which religion manifests itself, religion is the bond in which the worshippers are united with one another and with their God. The community which is thus united is at first the earliest form of society, whatever that form may have been, in which men dwell together for their common purposes. It is the fact that its members have common purposes and common interests which constitute them a community; and amongst the common interests without which there could be no community is that of common worship: knowledge of the sacra, being confined to the members of the community, is the test by which members are known, outsiders excluded, and the existence of the community as a community secured. At this stage, in a large number of societies--negro, Malayo-Polynesian, North American Indians, Eskimo, Australians--the belief in reincarnation takes a form in which the presence of souls of the departed is recognised as necessary to the very conception of the community. Thus in Alaska, among the Unalits of St. Michael's {60} Bay, a festival of the dead is observed, the equivalent of which appears to be found amongst all the Eskimo. M. Mauss (_L'Année Sociologique_, IX, 99) thus describes it: "It comprises two essential parts. It begins with praying the souls of the dead graciously to consent to reincarnate themselves for the moment in the namesake which each deceased person has; for the custom is that in each station the child last born always takes the name of the last person who has died. Then these living representatives of the deceased receive presents, and having received them the souls are dismissed from the abodes of the living to return to the land of the dead. Thus at this festival not only does the group regain its unity, but the rite reconstitutes the ideal group which consists of all the generations which have succeeded one another from the earliest times. Mythical and historic ancestors as well as later ones thus mingle with the living, and communion between them is conducted by means of the exchange of presents." Amongst people other than the Eskimo, a new-born child not only takes the name of the last member of the family or clan who has died, but is regarded as the reincarnation of the deceased. "Thus the number of individuals, {61} of names, of souls, of social functions in the clan is limited; and the life of the clan consists in the death and rebirth of individuals who are always identically the same" (_l.c._ 267).