t Spiegel's translation of the Zend Awtia, VoL III., p. 281.
820 THB DATA OF SOCIOLOGY.
forefathers. The act of a savage who at each meal thrown aside some food and drink for the spirits of the dead^ shows a wish to propitiate which was not felt by the Roman who offered a portion of each meal to his Lares. And if, on going abroad, the Boman prayed to his Lares for a happy return, he did not ascribe to them a power such as is ascribed to ghosts of relatives by the Indian or Yeddah who asks their aid when he goes hunting. Still less must we suppose any similarity between the ideas of the sanguinary Mexicans, Peruvians, Ghibchas, Dahomans, Ashantis, and others who inmiolate victims at funerals, and the ideas of those early Bomans who offered up human sacrifices at tombs.* Considering that they belonged to one of the noble types of man, we must conclude that they adopted the habit from baser types around them.
What shall we say of such modes of interpretation? We may say at least this, that were he allowed equal license in dealing with facts, the feeblest dialectician might safely undertake to establish any proposition that could be named.
§ 152. How unwarranted is the assertion that the superior races have not passed through this lower cult, will be seen on remembering that down to the present time, ancestor- worship lingers among the most civilized divisions of them. Throughout Europe it still shows itself, here feebly and there with some vigour, notwithstanding the repressive influence of Christianity.
Even among, Protestants the aboriginal ideas and senti- ments, and some of the acts, remain traceable. I do not refer merely to the decoration of graves with flowers, reminding us of the placings of flowers on graves by ancestor-worshipping peoples who also offered flowers to their deities; for this practice, spreading with the ritualistic reaction, may be considered as part of a revived Catholicism. I refer rather to certain less obtrusive facts. Obviously, * Smith's Dictionary of Oreek and Roman Antiqnitiet, pp. 569, 560.
dead parents are fl^equently thought of among uus approv* ing and disapproving. Their expressed wiBhea acquire a sacredness whicli they had not during their lives. They are figured in the minds of relatives as though they knew what was being done^ and as likely to be hurt by disregard of their injunctions. Occasionally a portrait will be fancied to look reproachfully on a descendant who is transgressing; and the anxiety not to disobey a dying wish certainly acts as a deterrent. Clearly^ then, however indefinite their forms have become, the aboriginal notions of subordination and propitiation have not wholly disappeared.
It is, however, among the Catholic peoples of Europe that this primitive religion most distinctly shows itself. The small chapels in cemeteries which the wealthier Catholics build, are manifestly analogous to the elaborate tombs of ancient races. If erecting a chapel to the Virgin is an act of worship, then the sentiment of worship cannot be wholly absent if the erected chapel is over a dead parent. And though mostly the prayers in such chapels, or at graves, are only for the dead, I am told by two French Catholics that exceptionally, when a pious parent is supposed to be not in purgatory but in heaven, there are prayers to the dead for intercession. A French correspondent questions this; but he admits that men and women who have died in the odour of sanctity, are canonized by popular opinion and adored. '^Ainsi, j'ai vu, en Bretagne, le tombeau d'un prAtre tr6s pieux et trds charitable: il etait convert de couronnes; ou s'y rendait en f oule fo 'pri&r de procurer des gu6risons, de veiller sur les enfants,'' etc., etc. Accepting only this last statement as trustworthy, it proves that the primitive religion lingers yet.
Even clearer proof that it lingers is yielded by the still extant customs of feeding the spirits, both annually and at other times. If we i*ead of periodic feasts for the dead among ancient nations,. or among the existing Cliinese, and regard such observances as parts of their ancestor- Y 322 THE DATA OF SOCIOLOGY.
worsliip; Sig^ if we learn that the feast 'of All Souls and various kindred obserrances^ are still continued in various parts of Europe, both by Teutons and Celts; can we deny that an original ancestor-worship is implied by them 7* § 153. See, then, how fully induction justifies deduction; and verifies the implication made clear in the last chapter.
Taking the aggregate of the human peoples — tribes, societies, nations — ^we find that nearly all of them, if not literally all, have a belief, vague and wavering or settled and distinct, in a reviving other-self of the dead man. Within this class of peoples, almost coextensive with the whole, we find a class not quite so large, by the members of which the other-self of the dead man, definitely believed in, is supposed to exist for a considerable period after death. Nearly as numerous is the class of peoples included in this, who show us ghost-propitiation, not only at the funeral, but for a subsequent interval. Then comes the narrower class contained in the last — ^the more settled and advanced peoples who, along with the developed belief in a ghost that permanently exists, show us a persistent ances- tor-worship. Again, somewhat further restricted, though * The following illastrative pasBage has heen translated for me: — " Roman Catholic peasants do not forget aU the year ronnd to care for the welfare of the souls of their dead. The crusts of the tahle are ooUected throughout the week, and on Saturday night are thrown into the hearth-fire; that they may serve as food for the souls during the following holy day. Any soup which drops on the tahle * * * is left to the poor souls. When a woman prepares the dough, she casts hehind her a handful of flour, and throws a piece of dough into the furnace; when she hakes little cakes, she puts some fat into the pan and the first cake into the fire. Wood-cutters put little pieces of hread which have hecomc too dry, upon the tree trunks: all for the good of the poor souls. • • • When the time of AU Souls is approaching, the same care for the deceased is shown more vividly. In every house a light is kept burning all night; the lamp i3 no longer filled with oil but with fat; a door, or at least a window, remains open, and the supper is left on the table, even with some additions; people go to bed earlier, — all to let the dear little angels enter without being disturbed. • • • Such is the custom of the peasants of the Tyrol, Old Bavaria, Upper Palatinate, and Oerman Bohemia." — jRochholz, Deutscher Olaube una ANCE8T0B-W0ESHIP IK OKNEBAL. 323 bj no means small, we have a class of peoples whose worship of distinguished ancestors begins to subordinate that of the undistinguished. And eventually, the subordination growing decided, becomes most marked where the an- cestors were the leaders of conquering races.
Even the words applied in more advanced societies to different orders of supernatural beings, indicate by their original community of meaning, that this has been the course of genesis. The fact cited above, that among the Tannese the word for a god means literally a dead man, is typical of facts everywhere found. Ghost, spirit, demon^ names at first applied to the other-self without distinc- tions of character— come to be differently applied as ascribed differences of character arise: the shade of an enemy becomes a devil, and a friendly shade becomes a divinity, here minor and local and there expanded and general. Where the conceptions have not developed far, there are no corresponding differentiated terms, and the distinctions made by us cannot be expressed. The early Spanish mis- sionaries in America were inconvenienced by finding that the only native word they could use for God also meant devil. In Greek, lalfMov and t§os are interchangeable. By wSlschylus, Agamemnon's children are represented as appealing to their father's ghost as to a god. So, too, with the Bomans. Besides the unspecialized use of dcumon, which means an angel or genius, good or bad, we find the unspecialized use of deu8 for god and ghost. On tombs the momes were called gods; and a law directs that '^ the rights of the manes-goia are to be kept sacred.'' Similarly with the Hebrews. Isaiah (viii. 19) thus represents himself as commanded to reject a current belief implying such identification: ^^ And when they say unto you, ^ Consult the ghost -seers and the wizards, that chirp and that mutter: should not people consult their gods, even the dead on behalf of the living?'" etc. When Saul goes to consult the ghost of Samuel, the expression of the enchantress is — " I saw gods [elohim] ascending out of 824 THE DATA OF BOCIOLOGT.
tbe earth ": god and ghost being thns used as equivalents.* Even down to onr own day the original kinship is traceable. The statement that God is a spirit^ is the application of a word which, otherwise applied, means a hnman soul. And only by its qualifying epithet is the meaning of the title Holy Ghost, distinguished from the meaning of ghost in general. We still describe a divine being by a word that originally meant the breath which, deserting the human body at death, was supposed to constitute the surviving part.
Do not these various evidences warrant the suspicion that from the ghost, once uniformly conceived, have arisen the variously-conceived supernatural beings? In pursuance of the law of Evolution we may infer, a priori f that there will take place multitudinous developments of the conceptions thus originating. The spirits of the dead, which in a primi- tive tribe form an ideal group the members of which are but little distinguished from one another, will grow more and more unlike. As societies become large, organized, involved, and as traditions, local and general, accumulate and complicate, these once-similar human souls, acquiring in the popular mind unlikenesses of character and import- ance, will differentiate until their community of nature becomes almost unrecognizable.
Expecting, then, extremely-divergent modifications of them, multiplying in thought as populations increase, ever spreading into more varied habitats, and tending continually to fill up every place in nature that can be occupied, let us now contemplate some of their most conspicuous types.
• Conoeming the first of these passages, which is given as rendered hy Cheyne, in his work on Isaiah, Cheyne (p. 83) explains the goda as the spirits of the departed national heroes. Concerning the second passage the Speaker's Commentary says — " It is possible that elohim is here used in a general sense of a supemtUural appearance, either angel or spirit." And concerning the word elohtm, Kuenen remarks (I., p. 224), " There is no doubt that originally the higher beings, the objects of man's fear {el6ah), were indicated by it [the name elohUn], so that this name too avails as an argument in favour of » former plurality of gods."
CHAPTER XXI.
§ 154. Facts already named show liow sacrifices to tlie man recently dead^ pass into sacrifices to Us preserved body. In § 137 we saw that to tlie corpse of a Tahitian cliief^ daily offerings were made on an altar by a priest; and tbe ancient Central Americans performed kindred rites before bodies dried by artificial heat. That^ along with a developed system of embalming, this grew into mnmmy-worship, Peruvians and Egyptians have furnished proof. Here the thing to be observed is that, while be- lieving the ghost of the dead man to have gone away, these peoples had confused notions, either that it was present in the mummy, or that the mummy was itself conscious. Among the Egyptians, this was clearly implied by the practice of sometimes placing their embalmed dead at table. The Peruvians, who by a parallel custom betrayed a like belief, also betrayed it in other ways. By some of them the dried corpse of a parent was carried round the fields that he might see the state of the crops. How the ancestor, thus recognized as present, was also recognized as exercising authority, we see in this story given by Santa Cruz. When his second sister refused to marry him, ''Huayna Ccapac went with presents and offerings to the body of his father, praying him to give 826 THB DATA OF SOOIOLOGT.
her for his wife, but the dead body gave no answer, while fearful signs appeared in the heavens/' The primitive idea that any property characterizing an aggregate inheres in all parts of it, implies a corollary from this belief. The soul, present in the body of the dead man preserved entire, is also present in preserved parts of his body. Hence the faith in relics. Ellis tells us that in the Sandwich Islands, bones of the legs, arms, and sometimes the skulls, of kings and principal chiefs, are carried about by their descendants, under the belief that the spirits exercise guardianship over them. The Crees carry bones and hair of dead persons about for three years. The Caribs, and several Guiana tribes, have their cleaned bones ''distributed among the relatives after death.'' The Tasmanians show '' anxiety to possess themselves of a bono from the skull or the arms of their deceased relatives." The Andamaneee ''widows may be seen with the skulls of their deceased partners suspended from their necks."
This belief in the power of relics leads in some cases to dii*ect worship of them. Erskine tells us that the natives of Lif u. Loyalty Islands, who " invoked the spirits of their departed chiefs," also "preserve relics of their dead, such as a finger-»nail, a tooth, a tuft of hair, * * * and pay divine homage to it." Of the New Caledonians Turner says — " In >cases of sickness, and other calamities, they present offer- ings of food to the skulls of the departed." Moreover, we have the evidence furnished by conversation with the relic. Lander says — "In the private ietish-hut of the King Adolee, at Badagry, the skull of that monarch's father is preserved in a clay vessel placed in the earth." He " gently rebukes it if his success does not happen to answer his expectations." Similarly, Catiin describes the Mandans as placing the skulls of their dead in a circle. Each wife knows the skull of her former husband or child, " and there seldom passes a day that she does not visit it, with a dish of the best cooked food. * * * There is scarcely an hour in a pleasant day, bat more or leas of these women mB,y be seen sitting or lying by the skull of their child or husband — ^talking to it in the most pleasant and endearing language that they can use (as they were wont to do in former days), and seemingly getting an answer back."
Thus propitiation of the man just dead leads to propi- tiation of liis preserved body or a preserved part of it; and the ghost is supposed to be present in the part as in the whole.
§ 155. Any Q^e asked to imagine a transition from wor- ship of the preserved body, or a preserved part of it, to idol- worship, would probably fail; but transitions such as imagination does not suggest, actually occur.
The object worshipped is sometimes a figure of the de- ceased, made partly of his remains and partly of other sub- stances. Landa says the Yucatanese ** cut o£f the heads of the ancient lords of Oocom, when they died, and, as if to cook them, cleared them from flesh; they then sawed off half of the top of the head, leaving the anterior part with the jaw-bones and teeth, and to these half-skulls they joined what they wanted in flesh with a certain cement, and made them as like as possible to those to whom they belonged; and they kept them along with the statues and the ashes. All were kept in the oratories of their houses beside their idols, and were greatly reverenced and assiduously cared for. On all their festivals they ofiered them food." # » « In other cases they " made for their fathers wooden statues," left "the occiput hollow," put in ashes of the burnt, body, and attached " the skin of the occiput taken off the corpse."
The Mexicans had a different method of joining some of the deceased's substance with an effigy of him. When a dead lord had been burned, /says Camargo, " they carefully collected the ashes, and after having kneaded them with human blood, they made of them an image of the deceased, which was kept in memory of him." And from Camargo we also learn that images of the dead were worshipped.
A transitional combination partially unlike in kind occurs: sometimes the ashes are contained in a man- S28 THS DATA OF 80CI0L00T.
shaped receptacle of clay. Of the Tucatanese tlie writer above quoted states that — ** The bodies of lords and people of high position were burnt. The ashes were put in large urns and temples erected over them. * 4^ * In the case of great lords the ashes were placed in hollow olay statues." And in yet other cases there i8 worship of the relics joined with the representative figure, not by inclusion but only by proximity. Thus the Mexicans, according to Gomara, ** closed the box [in which some hair and the teeth of the deceased king were present] and placed above it a wooden figure shaped and adorned like the deceased." Then they '' made great offerings, and placed them where he was burnt, and before the box and figure."
Lastly may be named the practice of the Egyptians, who, as their frescoes show, often worshipped the mummy not as exposed to view, but as inclosed in a cctse shaped and painted to represent the dead man.
§ 156. From these examples of transition we may turn to those in which the funeral propitiations are made to a sub- stituted image.
The Mexicans practised cremation; and when men killed in battle were missing, they made figures of them, and after honouring these burnt them and buried the ashes. Here are extracts from Clavigero and Torquemada: — "When any of the merchanis died on their journey, * * * his relations ^ * * formed an imperfect statue of wood to represent the deceased, to which they paid all the funeral honours which they would have done to the real dead body."
" When some one died drowned or in any other way which excluded concremation and required burial, they made a likeness of him and put it on the altar of idols, together with a large offering of wine and bread.'* In Africa kindred observances occur. While a deceased king of Congo is being embalmed, says Bastian, a wooden figure is set up in the palace to represent him, and is daily furnished with food and drink. Parkyns tells us that among the Abyssinians mourning takes place on the third day; and the deceased having been buried on the day of his deaths a representation of the corpse does duty instead. Of some Papuan Islanders Earl states that when the g^ve is filled with earthy they collect ronnd an idol and offer provi- sions to it. Concerning certain Javans we learn from Raffles that after a death a feast is held^ in which a man-shaped figure, supported round the body by the clothes of the de- ceased, plays an important part.
These practices look strange to us; but a stranger thing is that we have so soon forgotten the like practices of civilized nations. In Monstrelet^s Chronicles, Book i., the burial of Charles VI. of France is described thus:— " Over the coffin was an image of the late king, bearing a rich crown of gold and diamonds and holding two shields, one of gold, the other of silver; the hands had white gloves on, and the fingers were adorned with very precious rings. This image was dressed with doth of gold/* etc. * tt * ** In this state was he solemnly carried to the church of Notre Dame."
This usage was observed in the case of princes also. Speaking of the father of the great Cond^, Mme. de Motte- ville says — '^ The effigy of this prince was attended fservitj for three days^ as was customary:*' forty days having been the original time during which food was supplied to such an effigy at the usual hours. Monstrelet describes a like figure used at the burial of Henry V. of England; and the effigies of many English monarchs^ thus Jbonoured at their funerals, are still preserved in Westminster Abbey: the older having decayed into fragments.
With these reminders before us, we ought to have no difficulty in understanding the primitive ideas respecting such representations. When we read that the Coast Negroes in some districts " place certain earthen images on the graves'^; that the Araucanians fixed over a tomb an upright log, ''rudely carved to represent the human frame''; that after the deaths of New Zealand chiefs, wooden images, 20 to 40 ft. high, were erected as monu- ments; we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that the figure of the dead man is an incipient idol. Could we doubt, our 330 TiUS DATA or SOCIOLOGY.
doubt would end on finding the figure persistently wor- shipped. J. d'Aeosta tells us of the Peruvians that "each king had, while living, * * * a stone figore representing himself, called Guanqni [hnanqne] — i.e., brother. This figure was to be wor- shipped like tiie Ynca himself, during his life as well as after his death." So, too, according to Andagoja, " When a chief died, his house and wives and servants remained as in his lifetime, and a statue of gold was made in the likeness of the chie( which was served as if it had been alive, and certain villages were set apart to provide it with clothing, and aU other necessaries." And, similarly, CogoUudo testifies that the Yncatanese " worshipped the idol of one who is said to have been one of their great captains.*' § 157. That we may understand better the feelings with which a savage looks at a representative figure, let us recall the kindred feelings produced by representations among ourselves.
When a lover kisses the miniature of his mistress, he is obviously influenced by an association between the appear- ance and the reality. Even more strongly do such associa- tions sometimes act. A young lady known to me confesses that she cannot bear to sleep in a room having portraits on the walls; and this repugnance is not unparalleled. In such cases the knowledge that portraits consist of paint and canvas only, fails to expel the suggestion of something more. The vivid representation so strongly arouses the thought of a living personality, that this cannot be kept out of consciousness.
Now suppose culture absent — suppose there exist no ideas of attribute, law, cause — ^no distinctions between na- tural and unnatural, possible and impossible. This asso- ciated consciousness of a living presence will then persist. No conflict with established knowledge arising, the un- resisted suggestion will become a belief.
In § 133, beliefs thus produced in savages were inci- dentally referred to. Here are some further examples of mmmmmmmmm^^ tliem. Kane states that the Chinooka think portraits BupematuTal, and look at them with the same ceremony as at a dead person. According to Bancroft^ the Okanagans ''have the same aversion that has been noted on the coast '' to having their portraits taken. We learn from Catlin that the Mandans thought the life put into a picture was so much life taken from the original. He also says — ** They pronounoed me the greatest meekoina num ia the world; for they said I had made living beings, — ^they said they could see their chiefs alive in two places —those that I had made were a little alive — ^they could see their eyes move.*' Kor do more advanced races fail to supply kindred facts. Concerning the Malagasy^ Ellis testifies that friends of the prince^ on seeing a photograph of him^ took off their hats to it and verbally saluted it.
That which holds of a pictorial representation holds of a carved or sculptured one — ^holds even more naturally; since the carved representation being solid^ approaches closer to the reality. Where the image is painted and has eyes inserted^ this notion of participation in the vitality of the person imitated becomes^ in the uncritical mind of the savage, very strong. Any one who remembers the horror a child shows on seeing an adult put on an ugly mask, even when the mask has been previously shown to it, may con- ceive the awe which a rude effigy excites in the primitive mind. The sculptured figure of the dead man arouses the thought of the actual dead man, which passes into a con- viction, that he is present.
§ 158. And why should it not f If the other-self can leave the living body and re-enter it — if the ghost can come back and animate afresh the dead body — ^if the embalmed Peruvian, presently to be resuscitated by his wandering double, was then to need his carefully-preserved hair and nails — ^if the soul of the Egyptian, after its trans- migrations, occupying some thousands of years, was expected 832 THE DATA OF SOCIOLOOT.
to infuse itself once more into his mommy; why shonld not a spirit go into an image? A living body differs more from a mummy in texture^ than a mummy does from wood.
That a sayage does think an effigy is inhabited we have abundant proofs. Lander^ describing the Yorubans^ says a mother carries for some time a wooden figure of her lost child^ and when she eats^ puts part of her food to its lips.
The Samoiedes^ according to Bastian, ''feed the wooden images ot the dead.*' The relatives of an Ostyak " make a rude wooden image representmg, and in honour of, the deceased, which is set np in the yort and receives divine honours for a greater or less time as the priest directs. 4t * * At every meal they set an offering of food hefore the image; and should this represent a de- ceased hnshand, the widow embraces it from time to tune. « « « This kind of worship of the dead lasts about three years, at the end of which time the image is buried."
Ermah^ who states this^ adds the significant fact that the descendants of deceased priests preserve the images of their ancestors from generation to generation; " and, by well-contrived oracles and other arts, they manage to procure offerings for these their family penates, as abundant as diose laid on the altars of the universally-acknowledged gods. But that these latter also have an historical origin, that they were originally monuments of distinguished men, to which prescription and the interest of the Shamans gave by degrees an arbitrary meaning and importance, seems to me not liable to doubt."
These Ostyaks^ indeed^ show us unmistakably how worship of the dead man's effigy passes into worship of the divine idol; for the two are identical. At each meal^ placing the dishes before the household god^ they wait {i.e., fast) till " the idol, who eats invisibly, has had enough.'' More- over, we are told by Bastian that when a Samoiede goes on a journey, ''his relatives direct the idol towards the place to which he is gone, in order that it may look after him." How among the more advanced peoples of these regions there persists the idea that the idol of the god, developed as we have seen from the effigy of the dead man, is the re- ^ sidence of a conscious beings is implied by tbe following statement of Erman respecting tlie Russians of Irkutsk: — ** Whatever familiarities may be permitted between the sexes, the only scrapie by which the young women are infallibly controlled, is a superstitioas dread of being alone with their lovers in the presence of the holy images. Oonscientioas difficulties of this kind, however, are frequently obviated by putting these witnesses behind a curtain."