part i. ch. 3.

28 Schoolcraft, Indian in his Wigwam, p. 202. History, &c. of Indian Tribes, part iv. p. 173.

29 Schoolcraft, History of Indian Tribes, part ii. p. 68.

30 Ibid. pp. 403, 404.

although they say that journey extends to a distance of four days and nights and is wholly invisible. They light and tend that watch fire as a memorial of their departed companion and a rude expression of their own emotions; as an unconscious emblem of their own struggling faith, not as a beacon to the straying ghost. Again, the Indian mother, losing a nursing infant, spurts some of her milk into the fire, that the little spirit may not want for nutriment on its solitary path.31 Plato approvingly quotes Hesiod's statement that the souls of noble men become guardian demons coursing the air, messengers and agents of the gods in the world. Therefore, he adds, "we should reverence their tombs and establish solemn rites and offerings there;" though by his very statement these places were not the dwellings or haunts of the freely circuiting spirits.32

Not by an intellectual doctrine, but by an instinctive association, when not resisted and corrected, we connect the souls of the dead in our thoughts with the burial places of their forms. The New Zealand priests pretend by their spells to bring wandering souls within the enclosed graveyards.33 These sepulchral folds are full of ghosts. A sentiment native to the human breast draws pilgrims to the tombs of Shakspeare and Washington, and, if not restrained and guided by cultivated thought, would lead them to make offerings there. Until the death of Louis XV., the kings of France lay in state and were served as in life for forty days after they died.34 It would be ridiculous to attempt to wring any doctrinal significance from these customs. The same sentiment which, in one form, among the Alfoer inhabitants of the Arru Islands, when a man dies, leads his relatives to assemble and destroy whatever he has left, which, in another form, causes the Papist to offer burning candles, wreaths, and crosses, and to recite prayers, before the shrines of the dead saints, which, in still another form, moved Albert Durer to place all the pretty playthings of his child in the coffin and bury them with it, this same sentiment, in its undefined spontaneous workings, impelled the Peruvian to embalm his dead, the Blackfoot to inter his brave's hunting equipments with him, and the Cherokee squaw to hang fresh food above the totem on her husband's grave post. What should we think if we could foresee that, a thousand years hence, when the present doctrines and customs of France and America are forgotten, some antiquary, seeking the reason why the mourners in Pere la Chaise and Mount Auburn laid clusters of flowers on the graves of their lamented ones, should deliberately conclude that it was believed the souls remained in the bodies in the tomb and enjoyed the perfume of the flowers? An American traveller, writing from Vienna on All Saints' Day, in 1855, describes the avenues of the great cemetery filled with people hanging festoons of flowers on the tombstones, and placing burning candles of wax on the graves, and kneeling in devotion; it being their childish belief, he says, that their prayers on this day have efficacy to release their deceased relatives from purgatory, and that the dim taper flickering on the sod lights the unbound soul to its heavenly home. Of course these rites are not literal expressions of literal beliefs, but are

31 Andree, North America, p. 246.

32 Republic, book v. ch. 15.

33 R. Taylor, New Zealand, ch. 7.

34 Meiners, Kritische Geschichte der Religionen, buch iii. absch. 1.

symbols of ideas, emblems of sentiments, figurative and inadequate shadows of a theological doctrine, although, as is well known, there is, among the most ignorant persons, scarcely any deliberately apprehended distinction between image and entity, material representation and spiritual verity.

If a member of the Oneida tribe died when they were away from home, they buried him with great solemnity, setting a mark over the grave; and whenever they passed that way afterwards they visited the spot, singing a mournful song and casting stones upon it, thus giving symbolic expression to their feelings. It would be absurd to suppose this song an incantation to secure the repose of the buried brave, and the stones thrown to prevent his rising; yet it would not be more incredible or more remote from the facts than many a commonly current interpretation of barbarian usages. An amusing instance of error well enforcing the need of extreme caution in drawing inferences is afforded by the example of those explorers who, finding an extensive cemetery where the aborigines had buried all their children apart from the adults, concluded they had discovered the remains of an ancient race of pigmies! 35

The influence of unspeculative affection, memory, and sentiment goes far towards accounting for the funeral ritual of the barbarians. But it is not sufficient. We must call in further aid; and that aid we find in the arbitrary conceits, the poetic associations, and the creative force of unregulated fancy and imagination. The poetic faculty which, supplied with materials by observation and speculation, constructed the complex mythologies of Egypt and Greece, and which, turning on its own resources, composed the Arabian tales of the genii and the modern literature of pure fiction, is particularly active, fertile, and tyrannical, though in a less continuous and systematic form, in the barbarian mind. Acting by wild fits and starts, there is no end to the extravagant conjectures and visions it bodies forth. Destitute of philosophical definitions, totally unacquainted with critical distinctions or analytic reflection, absurd notions, sober convictions, dim dreams, and sharp perceptions run confusedly together in the minds of savages. There is to them no clear and permanent demarcation between rational thoughts and crazy fancies. Now, no phenomenon can strike more deeply or work more powerfully in human nature, stirring up the exploring activities of intellect and imagination, than the event of death, with its bereaving stroke and prophetic appeal. Accordingly, we should expect to find among uncultivated nations, as we actually do, a vast medley of fragmentary thoughts and pictures plausible, strange, lovely, or terrible relating to the place and fate of the disembodied soul. These conceptions would naturally take their shaping and coloring, in some degree, from thescenery, circumstances, and experience amidst which they were conceived and born. Sometimes these figments were consciously entertained as wilful inventions, distinctly contemplated as poetry. Sometimes they were superstitiously credited in all their grossness with full assent of soul. Sometimes all coexisted in vague bewilderment. These lines of separation unquestionably existed: the difficulty is to know where, in given instances, to draw them. A few examples will serve at once to illustrate the

35 Smithsonian Contributions, vol. ii. Squier's Aboriginal Monuments, appendix, pp. 127-131.

operation of the principle now laid down, and to present still further specimens of the barbarian notions of a future life.

Some Indian tribes made offerings to the spirits of their departed heroes by casting the boughs of various trees around the ash, saying that the branches of this tree were eloquent with the ghosts of their warrior sires, who came at evening in the chariot of cloud to fire the young to deeds of war.36 There is an Indian legend of a witch who wore a mantle composed of the scalps of murdered women. Taking this off, she shook it, and all the scalps uttered shrieks of laughter. Another describes a magician scudding across a lake in a boat whose ribs were live rattlesnakes.37 An exercise of mind virtually identical with that which gave these strokes made the Philippine Islanders say that the souls of those who die struck by lightning go up the beams of the rainbow to a happy place, and animated Ali to declare that the pious, on coming out of their sepulchres, shall find awaiting them white winged camels with saddles of gold. The Ajetas suspended the bow and arrows of a deceased Papuan above his grave, and conceived him as emerging from beneath every night to go a hunting.38 The fisherman on the coast of Lapland was interred in a boat, and a flint and combustibles were given him to light him along the dark cavernous passage he was to traverse. The Dyaks of Borneo believe that every one whose head they can get possession of here will in the future state be their servant: consequently, they make a business of "head hunting," accumulating the ghastly visages of their victims in their huts.39 The Caribs have a sort of sensual paradise for the "brave and virtuous," where, it is promised, they shall enjoy the sublimated experience of all their earthly satisfactions; but the "degenerate and cowardly" are threatened with eternal banishment beyond the mountains, where they shall be tasked and driven as slaves by their enemies.40 The Hispaniolians locate their elysium in a pleasant valley abounding with guava, delicious fruits, cool shades, and murmuring rivulets, where they expect to live again with their departed ancestors and friends.41 The Patagonians say the stars are their translated countrymen, and the milky way is a field where the departed Patagonians hunt ostriches. Clouds are the feathers of the ostriches they kill.42 The play is here seen of the same mythological imagination which, in Italy, pictured a writhing giant beneath Mount Vesuvius, and, in Greenland, looked on the Pleiades as a group of dogs surrounding a white bear, and on the belt of Orion as a company of Greenlanders placed there because they could not find the way to their own country. Black Bird, the redoubtable chief of the O Ma Haws, when dying, said to his people, "Bury me on yonder lofty bluff on the banks of the Missouri, where I can see the men and boats passing by on the river." 43 Accordingly, as soon as he ceased

36 Browne, Trees of America, p. 328.

37 Schoolcraft, Hist. &c part i. pp. 32-34.

38 Earl, The Papuans, p. 132.

39 Earl, The Eastern Seas, ch. 8.

40 Edwards, Hist. of the West Indies, book i. ch. 2.

41 Ibid. ch. 3.

42 Falkner, Patagonia, ch. 5.

43 Catlin, North American Indians, vol. ii. p. 6.

to breathe, they set him there, on his favorite steed, and heaped the earth around him. This does not imply any believed doctrine, in our sense of the term, but is plainly a spontaneous transference for the moment, by the poetic imagination, of the sentiments of the living man to the buried body.

The unhappy Africans who were snatched from their homes, enslaved and cruelly tasked in the far West India islands, pined under their fate with deadly homesickness. The intense longing moulded their plastic belief, just as the sensation from some hot bricks at the feet of a sleeping man shaped his dreams into a journey up the side of Atna. They fancied that if they died they should immediately live again in their fatherland. They committed suicide in great numbers. At last, when other means had failed to check this epidemic of self destruction, a cunning overseer brought them ropes and every facility for hanging, and told them to hang themselves as fast as they pleased, for their master had bought a great plantation in Africa, and as soon as they got there they would be set to work on it. Their helpless credulity took the impression; and no more suicides occurred.44

The mutual formative influences exerted upon a people's notions concerning the future state, by the imagination of their poets and the peculiarities of their clime, are perhaps nowhere more conspicuously exhibited than in the case of the Caledonians who at an early period dwelt in North Britain. They had picturesque traditions locating the habitation of ghosts in the air above their fog draped mountains. They promised rewards for nothing but valor, and threatened punishments for nothing but cowardice; and even of these they speak obscurely. Nothing is said of an under world. They supposed the ghosts at death floated upward naturally, true children of the mist, and dwelt forever in the air, where they spent an inane existence, indulging in sorrowful memories of the past, and, in unreal imitation of their mortal occupations, chasing boars of fog amid hills of cloud and valleys of shadow. The authority for these views is Ossian, "whose genuine strains," Dr. Good observes, "assume a higher importance as historical records than they can claim when considered as fragments of exquisite poetry."

"A dark red stream comes down from the hill. Crugal sat upon the beam; he that lately fell by the hand of Swaran striving in the battle of heroes. His face is like the beam of the setting moon; his robes are of the clouds of the hill; his eyes are like two decaying flames; dark is the wound on his breast. The stars dim twinkled through his form, and his voice was like the sound of a distant stream. Dim and in tears he stood, and stretched his pale hand over the hero. Faintly he raised his feeble voice, like the gale of the reedy Lego. 'My ghost, O'Connal, is on my native hills, but my corse is on the sands of Ullin. Thou shalt never talk with Crugal nor find his lone steps on the heath. I am light as the blast of Cromla, and I move like the shadow of mist. Connal, son of Colgar, I see the dark cloud of death. It hovers over the plains of Lena. The sons of green Erin shall fall. Remove from the field of ghosts.' Like the darkened moon, he retired in the midst of the whistling blast."

We recognise here several leading traits in all the early unspeculative faiths, the vapory form, the echoless motion, the marks of former wounds, the feeble voice, the memory

44 Meiners, Geschichte der Religionen, buch xiv. sect. 765.

of the past, the mournful aspect, and the prophetic words. But the rhetorical imagery, the scenery, the location of the spirit world in the lower clouds, are stamped by emphatic climatic peculiarities, whose origination, easily traceable, throws light on the growth of the whole mass of such notions everywhere.

Two general sources have now been described of the barbarian conceptions in relation to a future state. First, the natural operation of an earnest recollection of the dead; sympathy, regret, and reverence for them leading the thoughts and the heart to grope after them, to brood over the possibilities of their fate, and to express themselves in rites and emblems. Secondly, the mythological or arbitrary creations of the imagination when it is set strongly at work, as it must be by the solemn phenomena associated with death. But beyond these two comprehensive statements there is, directly related to the matter, and worthy of separate illustration, a curious action of the mind, which has been very extensively experienced and fertile of results. It is a peculiar example of the unconscious impartation of objective existence to mental ideas. With the death of the body the man does not cease to live in the remembrance, imagination, and heart of his surviving friends. By an unphilosophical confusion, this internal image is credited as an external existence. The dead pass from their customary haunts in our society to the imperishable domain of ideas. This visionary world of memory and fantasy is projected outward, located, furnished, and constitutes the future state apprehended by the barbarian mind. Feuerbach says in his subtle and able Thoughts on Death and Immortality, "The Realm of Memory is the Land of Souls." Ossian, amid the midnight mountains, thinking of departed warriors and listening to the tempest, fills the gale with the impersonations, of his thoughts, and exclaims, "I hear the steps of the dead in the dark eddying blast."

The barbarian brain seems to have been generally impregnated with the feeling that every thing else has a ghost as well as man. The Gauls lent money in this world upon bills payable in the next. They threw letters upon the funeral pile to be read by the soul of the deceased.45 As the ghost was thought to retain the scars of injuries inflicted upon the body, so, it appears, these letters were thought, when destroyed, to leave impressions of what had been written on them. 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 mancs. The obolus for Charon, the cake of honey for Cerberus, the shadows of these articles would be borne and used by the shadow of the dead man. Leonidas saying, "Bury me on my shield: I will enter even Hades as a Lacedamonian," 46 must either have used the word Hades by metonymy for the grave, or have imagined that a shadowy fac simile of what was interred in the grave went into the grim kingdom of Pluto. It was a custom with some Indian tribes, on the new made grave of a chief, to slay his chosen horse; and when he fell they supposed

"That then, upon the dead man's plain, The rider grasp'd his steed again."

45 Pomponius Mela, De Orbis Situ, iii. 2.

46 Translation of Greek Anthology, in Bohn's Library, p. 58.

The hunter chases the deer, each alike a shade. A Feejee once, in presence of a missionary, took a weapon from the grave of a buried companion, saying, "The ghost of the club has gone with him." The Iroquois tell of a woman who was chased by a ghost. She heard his faint war whoop, his spectre voice, and only escaped with her life because his war club was but a shadow wielded by an arm of air. The Slavonians sacrificed a warrior's horse at his tomb.47 Nothing seemed to the Northman so noble as to enter Valhalla on horseback, with a numerous retinue, in his richest apparel and finest armor. It was firmly believed, Mallet says, that Odin himself had declared that whatsoever was burned or buried with the dead accompanied them to his palace.48 Before the Mohammedan era, on the death of an Arab, the finest camel he had owned was tied to a stake beside his grave, and left to expire of hunger over the body of his master, in order that, in the region into which death had introduced him, he should be supplied with his usual bearer.49 The Chinese who surpass all other people in the offerings and worship paid at the sepulchres of their ancestors make little paper houses, fill them with images of furniture, utensils, domestics, and all the appurtenances of the family economy, and then burn them, thus passing them into the invisible state for the use of the deceased whom they mourn and honor.50 It is a touching thought with the Greenlanders, when a child dies, to bury a dog with him as a guide to the land of souls; for, they say, the dog is able to find his way anywhere.51 The shadow of the faithful servant guides the shadow of the helpless child to heaven. In fancy, not without a moved heart, one sees this spiritual Bernard dog bearing the ghost child on his back, over the spectral Gothard of death, safe into the sheltering hospice of the Greenland paradise.

It is strange to notice the meeting of extremes in the rude antithetical correspondence between Plato's doctrine of archetypal ideas, the immaterial patterns of earthly things, and the belief of savages in the ghosts of clubs, arrows, sandals, and provisions. The disembodied soul of the philosopher, an eternal idea, turns from the empty illusions of matter to nourish itself with the substance of real truth. The spectre of the Mohawk devours the spectre of the haunch of roast venison hung over his grave. And why should not the two shades be conceived, if either?

"Pig, bullock, goose, must have their goblins too, Else ours would have to go without their dinners: If that starvation doctrine were but true, How hard the fate of gormandizing sinners!"

The conception of ghosts has been still further introduced also into the realm of mathematics in an amusing manner. Bishop Berkeley, bantered on his idealism by Halley, retorted that he too was an idealist; for his ultimate ratios terms only appearing with the

47 Wilkinson, Dalmatia and Montenegro, vol. i. ch. 1.

48 Northern Antiquities, ch. 10.

49 Lamartine, History of Turkey, book i. ch. 10.

50 Kidd, China, sect. 3.

51 Crantz, History of Greenland, book iii. ch. 6, sect. 47.

disappearance of the forms in whose relationship they consist were but the ghosts of departed quantities! It may be added here that, according to the teachings of physiological psychology, all memories or recollected ideas are literally the ghosts of departed sensations.

We have thus seen that the conjuring force of fear, with its dread apparitions, the surmising, half articulate struggles of affection, the dreams of memory, the lights and groups of poetry, the crude germs of metaphysical speculation, the deposits of the inter action of human experience and phenomenal nature, now in isolated fragments, again, huddled indiscriminately together conspire to compose the barbarian notions of a future life.