of interest is found to-day as a general characteristic of savages.
The Goajiros of Venezuela bury their dead, they confess, simply
to get rid of them. The Galibis of Guiana, when asked the
meaning of their curious funeral ceremony, which consists in
dancing on the grave, replied that they did it to stamp down
the earth. Fuegians, Bushmen, Veddahs, show the same lack of
concern and interest in the memory of the dead. Even the
Eskimos, conspicuous as they are for their intelligence and
sociability, save themselves the trouble of caring for their sick
and old by walling them up and leaving them to die in a lonely
hut; the Chukches stone or strangle them to death; some
Indian tribes give them over to tigers, and the Battas of Sumatra
eat them. This indifference is not dictated by any realization
that death means annihilation of the personality. The savage
conception of a future state is one that involves no real break in
the continuity of life as he leads it. If a man dies without being
wounded he is considered to be the victim of the sorcerers and
the evil spirits with which they consort. Throughout Africa
the death of anyone is ascribed to the magicians of some hostile
tribe or to the malicious act of a neighbour. A culprit is easily
discovered either by an appeal to a local diviner or in torturing
some one into confession. In Australia it is the same. Mr
Andrew Lang says that “whenever a native dies, no matter
how evident it may be that death has been the result of natural
causes, it is at once set down that the defunct was bewitched.”
The Bechuanas and all Kaffir tribes believe that death, even at an
advanced age, if not from hunger or violence, is due to witchcraft,
and blood is required to expiate or avenge it. Similar beliefs
are found among the Papuans, and among the Indians of both
Americas. The history of witchcraft in Europe and its attendant
horrors, so vividly painted in Lecky’s Rise of Rationalism, are but
echoes of this universal refusal of savage man to accept death as
the natural end of life. Even to-day the ignorant peasantry of
many European countries, Russia, Galicia and elsewhere, believe
that all disease is the work of demons, and that medicinal herbs
owe their curative properties to their being the materialized forms
of benevolent spirits.
This animistic tendency is a marked characteristic of primitive Man in every land. The savage explains the processes of inanimate nature by assuming that living beings or spirits, possessed of capacities similar to his own, are within the inanimate object. The growth of a tree, the spark struck from a flint, the devastating floods of a river, mean to him the natural actions of beings within the tree, stone or water. And thus too he explains to himself the phenomena of human life, believing that each man has within him a mannikin or animal which dictates his actions in life. This miniature man is the savage’s conception of the soul; sleep and trance being regarded as the temporary, death as the permanent, absence of the soul. Each individual is thus deemed to have a dual existence. This “subliminal” self (in modern terminology) has many forms. The Hurons thought that it possessed head, body, arms and legs, in fact that it was an exact miniature of a man. The Nootkas of British Columbia regard it as a tiny man, living in the crown of the head. So long as it stands erect, its possessor is well, but if it falls from its position the misfortunes of ill-health and madness at once assail him. The ancient Egyptian believed in the soul or “double.” The inhabitants of Nias, an island to the west of Sumatra, have the strange belief that to everyone before birth is given the choice of a long and heavy or short and light soul (a parallel belief may be found in early Greek philosophy), and his choice determines the length of life. Sometimes the soul is conceived as a bird. The Bororos of Brazil fancy that in that shape the soul of a sleeper passes out of the body during night-time, returning to him at his awakening. The Bella Coola Indians say the soul is a bird enclosed in an egg and lives in the nape of the neck. If the shell bursts and the soul flies away, the man must die. If however the bird flies away, egg and all, then he faints or loses his reason. A popular superstition in Bohemia assumes that the soul in the shape of a white bird leaves the body by way of the mouth. Among the Battas of Sumatra rice or grain is sprinkled on the head of a man who returns from a dangerous enterprise, and in the latter case the grains are called padiruma tondi, “means to make the soul (tondi) stay at home.” In Java the new-born babe is placed in a hen-coop, and the mother makes a clucking noise, as if she were a hen, to attract the child’s soul. It is regarded by many savage peoples as highly dangerous to arouse a sleeper suddenly, as his soul may not have time to return. Still more dangerous is it to move a sleeper, for the soul on its return might not be able to find the body. Flies and butterflies are forms which the souls are believed by some races to take, and the Esthonians of the island of Oesel think that the gusts of wind which whirl tornado-like through the roads are the souls of old women seeking what they can find.
But more widespread perhaps than any belief, from its simplicity doubtless, is the idea that the body’s shadow or reflexion is the soul. The Basutos think that crocodiles can devour the shadow of a man cast on the surface of water. In many parts of the world sorcerers are credited with supernatural powers over a man by an attack on his shadow. The sick man is considered to have lost his shadow or a part of it. Dante refers to the shadowless spectre of Virgil, and the folklore of many European countries affords examples of the prevalence of the superstition that a man must be as careful of his shadow as of his body. In the same way the reflexion-soul is thought to be subject to a malice of enemies or attacks of beasts and has been the cause of superstitions which in one form or another exist to-day. From the Fijian and Andaman islander who exhibits abject terror at seeing himself in a glass or in water, to the English or European peasant who covers up the mirrors or turns them to the wall, upon a death occurring, lest an inmate of the house should see his own face and have his own speedy demise thus prognosticated, the idea holds its ground. It was probably the origin of the story of Narcissus, and there is scarcely a race which is free from the haunting dread. Lastly the soul is pictured as being a man’s breath (anima), and this again has come down to us in literature, evidenced by the fact that the word “breath” has become a synonym for life itself. The “last breath” has meant more than a mere metaphor. It expresses the savage belief that there departs from the dying in the final expiration a something tangible, capable of separate existence—the soul. Among the Romans custom imposed a sacred duty on the nearest relative, usually the heir, to inhale the “last breath” of the dying. Moreover the classics bear evidence to the sanctity with which sentiment surrounded the last kiss; Cicero, in his speech against Verres, saying “Matres ab extremo complexu liberum exclusae: quae nihil aliud orabant nisi ut filiorum extremum spiritum ore excipere sibi liceret.” Virgil, too, refers in the Aeneid, iv. 684, to the custom, which survives to-day as a ceremonial practice among many savage and semi-civilized people.
From the inability of the savage in all ages and in all lands to comprehend death as a natural phenomenon, there results a tendency to personify death, and myths are invented to account for its origin. Sometimes it is a “taboo” which has been broken and gives Death power over man. In New Zealand Maui, the divine hero of Polynesia, was not properly baptized. In Australia a woman was told not to go near a tree where a bat lived: she infringed the prohibition, the bat fluttered out, and death resulted. The Ningphoos were dismissed from Paradise and became mortal because one of them bathed in water which had been “tabooed” (Dalton, p. 13). Other versions of the Death-myth in Polynesia relate that Maui stole a march on Night as she slept, and would have passed right through her to destroy her, but a little bird which sings at sunset woke her, she destroyed Maui, and men lost immortality. In India Yama, the god of Death, is assumed, like Maui, to have been the first to “spy out the path to the other world.” In the Solomon Islands (Jour. Anth. Inst., February 1881) “Koevari was the author of death, by resuming her cast-off skin.” The same story is told in the Banks Islands. The Greek myth (Hesiod, Works and Days, 90) alleged that mortals lived “without ill diseases that give death to men” till the cover was lifted from the box of Pandora. This personification of Death has had as a consequence the introduction into the folklore of many lands of stories, often
