Ahuramazda, a body must not be burned or buried; and so the
ancient Persians and their descendants the Parsees build Dakmas
or “towers of silence” on hill-tops far from human habitations.
Inside these the corpses are laid on a flagged terrace which
drains into a central pit. Twice a year the bones, picked clean
by dogs and birds of prey, are collected in the pit, and when it
is full another tower is built. In ancient times perhaps the
bodies of the magi or priests alone were exposed at such expense;
the common folk were covered with wax and laid in the earth,
the wax saving the earth from pollution. In Rome and Greece
the corpse was buried by night, lest it should pollute the sunlight;
and a trough of water was set at the door of the house of death
that men might purify themselves when they came out, before
mixing in general society. Priests and magistrates in Rome
might not meet or look on a corpse, for they were thereby
rendered unclean and incapable of fulfilling their official duties
without undergoing troublesome rites of purification. At a
Roman funeral, when the remains had been laid in the tomb,
all present were sprinkled with lustral water from a branch of
olive or laurel called aspergillum; and when they had gone
home they were asperged afresh and stepped over a fire. The
house was also swept out with a broom, probably lest the ghost
of the dead should be lying about the floor. Many races, to
avoid pollution, destroy the house and property of the deceased.
Thus the Navahos pull down the hut in which he died, leaving its
ruins on the ground; but if it be an expensive hut, a shanty
is extemporized alongside, into which the dying man is transferred
before death. No one will use the timbers of a hut so
ruined. A burial custom of the Solomon Islands, noted by
R. H. Codrington (The Melanesians, p. 255), may be dictated
by the same scruple. There “the mourners having hung up a
dead man’s arms on his house make great lamentations; all
remains afterwards untouched, the house goes to ruin, mantled,
as time goes on, with the vines of the growing yams, a picturesque
and indeed, perhaps, a touching sight; for these things are not
set up that they may in a ghostly manner accompany their
former owner.” H. Oldenberg (Religion des Veda, p. 426) describes
how Hindus shave themselves and cut off their nails after a
death, at the same time that they wash, renew the hearth fire,
and furnish themselves with new vessels. For the hair and
nails may harbour pollution, just as the medieval Greeks believed
that evil spirits could lurk in a man’s beard (Leo Allatius, De
opinionibus quorundam Graecorum). The dead man’s body
is shorn and the nails cut for a kindred reason; for it must be
purified as much as can be before it is burned as an offering on
the pyre and before he enters on a new sphere of existence.
2. We are accustomed to regard mourning costume as primarily an outward sign of our grief. Originally, however, the special garb seems to have been intended to warn the general public that persons so attired were unclean. In ancient Rome mourners stayed at home and avoided all feasts and amusements; laying aside gold, purple and jewels, they wore black dresses called lugubria or even skins. They cut neither hair nor beard, nor lighted fire. Under the emperors women began to wear white. On the west coast of Africa negroes wear white, on the Gold Coast red. The Chinese wear hemp, which is cheap, for mourning dress must as a rule be destroyed when the season of grief is past to get rid of the taboo. Among the Aruntas of Australia the wives of a dead man smear themselves with white pipe-clay until the last ceremonies are finished, sometimes adding ashes—this not to conceal themselves from the ghost (which may partly be the aim of some mourning costumes), but to show the ghost that they are duly sorrowing for their loss. These widows must not talk except on their hands for a whole year. “Among the Maoris,” says Frazer (Golden Bough, i. 323), “anyone who had handled a corpse, helped to convey it to the grave, or touched a dead man’s bones; was cut off from all intercourse and almost all communication with mankind. He could not enter any house, or come into contact with any person or thing, without utterly bedevilling them. He might not even touch food with his hands, which had become so frightfully tabooed or unclean as to be quite useless. Food would be set for him on the ground, and he would then sit or kneel down, and, with his hands carefully held behind his back, would gnaw at it as best he could.” Often a degraded outcast was kept in a village to feed mourners. Such a taboo is strictly similar to those which surround a sacred chief or his property, a menstruous woman or a homicide, rendering them dangerous to themselves and to all who approach them.
3. Primitive folk cannot conceive of a man’s soul surviving apart from his body, nor of another life as differing from this, and the dead must continue to enjoy what they had here. Accordingly the Patagonians kill horses at the grave that the dead may ride to Alhuemapu, or country of the dead. After a year they collect a chief’s bones, arrange them, tie them together and dress them in his best garments with beads and feathers. Then they lay him with his weapons in a square pit, round which dead horses are placed set upright on their feet by stakes. As late as 1781 in Poland F. Casimir’s horse was slain and buried with him. In the Caucasus a Christian lady’s jewels are buried with her. The Hindus used to burn a man’s widow on his pyre, because he could not do without her; and St Boniface commends the self-sacrifice of the Wend widows who in his day burned themselves alive on their husbands’ pyres.
The tumuli met with all over the north of Europe (in the Orkneys alone 2000 remain) are regular houses of the dead, models of those they occupied in life. The greater the dignity of the deceased, the loftier was his barrow. Silbury hill is 170 ft. high; the tomb of Alyattes, father of Croesus, was a fourth of a league round; the Pyramids are still the largest buildings in existence; at Oberea in Tahiti is a barrow 267 ft. long, 87 wide and 44 high. Some Eskimo just leave a dead man’s body in his house, and shut it up, often leaving by his side a dog’s head to guide him on his last journey, along with his tools and kayak. The Sea Dyaks set a chief adrift in his war canoe with his weapons. So in Norse story Hake “was laid wounded on a ship with the dead men and arms; the ship was taken out to sea and set on fire.” The Viking was regularly buried in his ship or boat under a great mound. He sailed after death to Valhalla. In the ship was laid a stone as anchor and the tools, clothes, weapons and treasures of the dead. The Egyptians, whose land was the gift of the river Nile, equally believed that the dead crossed over water, and fashioned the hearse in the form of a boat. Hence perhaps was derived the Greek myth of Charon and the Styx, and the custom, which still survives in parts of Europe, of placing a coin in the mouth of the dead with which to pay the ferryman. The Egyptians placed in the tomb books of a kind to guide the dead to the next world. The Copts in a later age did the same, and to this custom we owe the recovery in Egypt of much ancient literature. The Armenians till lately buried with a priest his missal or gospel.
In Egyptian entombments of the XIIth to the XIVth dynasties were added above the sepulchres what Professor Petrie terms soul-houses, viz. small models of houses furnished with couch and table, &c., for the use of the ka or double whenever it might wish to come above ground and partake of meats and drinks. They recall, in point of size, the hut-urns of the Etruscans, but the latter had another use, for they contain incinerated remains. Etruscan tombs, like those of Egypt and Asia Minor, were made to resemble the dwelling-houses of the living, and furnished with coffered ceilings, panelled walls, couches, stools, easy chairs with footstools attached, all hewn out of the living rock (Dennis, Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, vol i. p. lxx.).
Of the old Peruvian mummies in the Kircherian Museum at Rome, several are of women with babies in their arms, whence it is evident that a mother had her suckling buried with her; it would console her in the next world and could hardly survive her in this. The practice of burying ornaments, tools and weapons with the dead characterizes the inhumations of the Quaternary epoch, as if in that dim and remote age death was already regarded as the portal of another life closely resembling this. The cups, tools, weapons, ornaments and other articles deposited with the dead are often carefully broken or turned upside down and inside out; for the soul or manes of objects is liberated by such fracture or inversion and so passes into the
