Professor Wilken, again, suggests that the mourners abstain from food till they have given the dead his due, in order to show that they do not wish to keep him waiting longer than is necessary and thus make him kindly disposed towards them.[1] This explanation presupposes that the fast is immediately followed by offerings or a feast for the dead. In some instances this is expressly said to be the case;[2] the ancient Chinese, for instance, observed a special fast as an introductory rite to the sacrifices which they offered to the manes at regular periods after the demise and even after the close of the mourning.[3] But generally there is no indication of the mourning fast being an essential preliminary to a sacrifice to the dead, and in an instance mentioned above the funeral feast regularly precedes it.[4]
It seems that Dr. Frazer comes much nearer the truth when he observes that people originally fasted after a death "just in those circumstances in which they considered that they might possibly in eating devour a ghost."[5] Yet I think it would be more correct to say that they were afraid of swallowing, not the ghost, but food polluted with the contagion of death. The dead body is regarded as a seat of infection, which defiles anything in its immediate neighbourhood, and this infection is of course considered particularly dangerous if it is allowed to enter into the bowels. In certain cases the length of the mourning fast is obviously determined by the belief in the polluting presence of the ghost. The six days' fast of the Paressí coincides with the period
- ↑ Wilken, in Revue coloniale internationale, iv. 347, 348, 350 sq. n. 32.
- ↑ Selenka, Sonnige Welten, p. 90 (Dyaks). Black, 'Fasting,' in Encyclopœdia Britannica, ix. 44.
- ↑ de Groot, op. cit. (vol. ii. book) i, 656.
- ↑ Supra, p. 398.
- ↑ Frazer, 'Certain Burial Customs as illustrative of the Primitive Theory of the Soul,' in Jour. Anthr. Inst. xv. 94. See also Oldenberg, op. cit. pp. 270, 590.
