Sir George Grey was hugged and wept over by an old woman who found in him a son she had lost, or when a convict, recognized as a deceased relative, was endowed anew with the land he had possessed during his former life. A similar theory may be traced northward by the Torres Islands to New Caledonia, where the natives thought the white men to be the spirits of the dead who bring sickness, and assigned this as their reason for wishing to kill white men.[1] In Africa, again, the belief is found among the Western negroes that they will rise again white, and the Bari of the White Nile, believing in the resurrection of the dead on earth, considered the first white people they saw as departed spirits thus come back.[2]
Next, the lower psychology, drawing no definite line of demarcation between souls of men and of beasts, can at least admit without difficulty the transmission of human souls into the bodies of the lower animals. A series of examples from among the native tribes of America will serve well to show the various ways in which such ideas are worked out. The Ahts of Vancouver's Island consider the living man's soul able to enter into other bodies of men and animals, going in and out like the inhabitant of a house. In old times, they say, men existed in the forms of birds, beasts, and fishes, or these had the spirits of the Indians in their bodies; some think that after death they will pass again into the bodies of the animals they occupied in this former state.[3] In an Indian district of North-West
- ↑ Grey, 'Australia,' vol. i. p. 301, vol. ii. p. 363 [native's accusation against some foreign sailors who had assaulted him, 'djanga Taal-wurt kyle-gut bomb-gur,'—'one of the dead struck Taal-wurt under the ear,' &c. The word djanga=the dead, the spirits of deceased persons (see Grey, 'Vocab. of S. W. Australia'), had come to be the usual term for a European]. Lang, 'Queensland,' pp. 34, 336; Bonwick, 'Tasmanians,' p. 183; Scherzer, 'Voy. of Novara,' vol. iii. p. 34; Bastian, 'Psychologie,' p. 222, 'Mensch,' vol. iii. pp. 362-3, and in Lazarus and Steinthal's 'Zeitschrift,' l. c.; Turner, 'Polynesia,' p. 424.
- ↑ Römer, 'Guinea,' p. 85; Brun-Rollet, 'Nil Blanc,' &c. p. 234.
- ↑ Sproat, 'Savage Life,' ch. xviii., xix., xxi. Souls of the dead appear in dreams, either in human or animal forms, p. 174. See also Brinton, p. 145.
