mementoes into personal ornaments. After all, the repulsive hair bracelets and watchguards of the Early Victorian era were sanctioned by contemporary taste. The skeleton itself or parts of it are retained by the savage in what often seems to be purely affectionate remembrance; the Australian mother, with touching devotion, bearing with her the little packet that encloses the remains of her baby.[1]
From the magico-religious point of view we find that in many cases the idea does not seem to go beyond preserving for oneself the mana of the dead man, as we see in the Australian custom of tying to the end of one's spear the arm-bone of the deceased, which can only mean that the power of his arm is desired.[2]
By a natural transition we are led on to the practice of preserving the body as a whole. The artificial embalming of the body according to Professor Elliot Smith, arose in Egypt in imitation of the naturally preserving effect of the desert sands.[3] Hence, he says, the custom spread to the various parts of the world where it has been found, and with it spread the now universal belief in immortality to which he believes the custom gave rise. The claim is ambitious, and up to the present lacks sufficient demonstration. For the present, therefore, we must believe that the soul may be older than Egyptian culture; and it is here suggested that the Egyptian method only differs in external detail, not in its deep underlying significance, from many other modes of burial of a much more primitive kind. So, too, the libation formulae which he quotes are presumably only the articulate expression of a general motive which appears more obscurely in many burial customs or in ideas associated therewith.
- ↑ Howitt, Native Tribes of S.E. Australia, London, 1904, pp. 248, 250. See also p. 468.
- ↑ Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes of Central Australia, p. 463.
- ↑ G. Elliot Smith, Migrations of Early Culture, Manchester, 1915, pp. 35, 36.
