DREAMS:
THEIR PLACE IN THE GROWTH OF BELIEFS IN THE SUPERNATURAL.

DREAMS: THEIR PLACE IN THE GROWTH OF BELIEFS IN THE SUPERNATURAL.

§ I.

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SAVAGE AND CIVILISED MAN.

The evidence as to pre-historic man’s material furniture and surroundings, which was first gathered from and restricted to ancient river valleys and bone caverns of Great Britain, France, and Belgium, is no longer isolated. It is supported by evidence which has been collected from every part of the globe inhabited in past or present times, and its uniform character has enabled us to determine what lies beyond an horizon which within the last half century was bounded by the hazy line of myth and tradition. So rigid seemed the limit defining man’s knowledge of his past that some forty years ago even the Geological Society of London recorded with barest reference the unearthing of relics witnessing to his presence in Britain hundreds of thousands of years ago. The canon was closed, and no one ventured to add to the sayings of the book. But the discoveries which had disproved belief in the earth’s supremacy in the universe, and in its creation in six days, led the way to researches into the history of the life upon its surface, and especially of that which, in the language of ancient writ, was “made in the image of God.” When the long-forbidding line, imaginary as the equator and lacking its convenience, was crossed, there was found the evidence of the conditions under which man emerged from a state quite other than that which had formed the burden of legends sacred with the hoariness of time. Those conditions, it is well-nigh needless to remind the reader, accord with that theory which holds man to be no specially-created being, started on this earth, fully equipped, Minerva-like, with all ripeness of wisdom and loftiness of soul, but the last and long result of an ever-ascending series of organisms ranging from the lowest, shapeless, nerveless specks to homo sapiens, “the foremost in the files of time.” Evolution is advance from the simple to the complex. The most primitive forms reach maturity in a shorter time than the higher forms, and fulfil their purpose quicker, and this doctrine applies not only in relation to man and the inferior creatures, but as between the several races of man himself. Herein the differences, which are determined by size, still more by increase in complexity, of brain-stuff, are greater than between the lowest man and the highest animals—that is to say, the savage and civilised man are farther apart than the savage and the anthropoid ape. The cranial capacity of the modern Englishman surpasses that of the non-Aryan inhabitant of India by a difference of sixty-eight cubic inches, while between this non-Aryan skull and the skull of the gorilla the difference in capacity is but eleven inches,[60] and if we were to take into account the differences in structural complexity, as indicated by the creasing and furrowing of the brain surface, the contrast would be still more striking.

The brains of the earliest known races, the men of the Ancient Stone Age, ape-like savages who fought with woolly-haired elephants, cave-lions, and cave-bears, amidst the forests and on the slopes of the valleys and hills where London now stands, and who in the dawn of human intelligence, applying means to ends, came off victorious, were doubtless much nearer to the chimpanzee with his thirty-five cubic inches than to the Papuan with his fifty-five cubic inches. Indeed, we need not travel beyond this age or island; it suffices to compare the brain quality of the rustic, thinking of “maistly nowt,” with that of the highest minds amongst us, as evidence of the enormous diversity between wild and cultivated stocks of mankind.

Unless we are so enchained to fond delusions as to place man in a kingdom by himself, and deny in the sympathetic, moral, and intellectual faculties in brutes the germs of those capacities which, existing in a pre-human ancestry, have flowered in the noblest and wisest of our race, we may find in such differences as are shown to occur between civilised and primitive man further evidence of the enormous time since the latter appeared. For unnumbered ages man—then physically hardly distinguishable from apes—may have remained stationary. Certainly the relics from the Drift show no advance: given no change in the conditions, the species do not vary, and man, once adapted to his surroundings, changed only as these changed. But, obscure as are the causes, there came a period when conditions arose inducing some variation, no matter how slight, in brain development, which was of more need than any variation in the rest of the body, and when an impetus was given which, leaving the latter but slightly affected, quickened the former, so that man passed from the highest animality to the lowest humanity. Slowly, in the course of a struggle not yet ended, “the ape and tiger” were subdued within him, and those social conditions induced to which are due that progress which ever draws him nearer to the angels.The discussion of this in detail lies outside the limits of these pages. Here, after briefly noting on what lines it must run, we are concerned with man at that far later stage in his development when the physical and material evidence respecting his bodily development gives place to the psychical and immaterial evidence respecting his mental development. Chipped flints, flakes, and scrapers of the Drift are indispensable witnesses to his primitive state, but during the long ages that he was making shift with them he remains within the boundaries of the zoological; he is more geological than human. Gleams of the soul within that will one day be responsive to grace of form and harmony of colour appear in the rude portraits of mammoth, reindeer, urus, whale, and man himself, scratched on ivory and horn. Indications of germinal ideas about an after-life are present in the contents of tumuli with the skeletons in defined positions, and with weapons presumably for the use of the departed in the happy hunting-grounds. In these last we are nearing the historic period, for a vast interval exists between the tomb-building races and the men of the Reindeer Period, yet even then the ages are many before man had so advanced as to bequeath the intangible relics of his thought, disclosing what answer he had beat out for himself to the riddle of the earth and the mysteries of life and death. Although the story of his intellectual and spiritual development is a broken one, of the earlier chapters of which we have no record, enough survives to induce and strengthen the conviction that in this, as in aught else, there is no real disconnection. In the shaping of the rudest pointed flint-tool and weapon there are the germs of the highest mechanical art; in the discordant war-whoop of the savage the latent strains of the “Marseillaise,” as, quoting Tennyson, in the eggs of the nightingale sleeps the music of the moon. If we cannot get so near to the elemental forms of thought as we could wish, we must lay hold of the lowest extant, and trace in these the connection to be sought between the barbaric and civilised mind. We must have understanding of the mental condition of races, still on low levels of culture, and if the result is to show that many highly-elaborated beliefs among advanced peoples are but barbaric philosophies “writ large,” the conception of an underlying unity between all nations of men that do dwell, or have dwelt, on the face of the earth, will receive additional proof.

§ II.

LIMITATIONS OF BARBARIC LANGUAGE.

Illustrations of the low intellectual stage of some extant races not quite at the bottom of the scale, drawn from simple matters, will make clearer how they will interpret matters of a more complex order, and interpret them only in one way.

Of the beginning of thought we can know nothing. For numberless ages man was marked out from the animals most nearly allied to him by that power of more readily adapting means to ends which gave him mastery over nature. Through that dim and dateless time he thought without knowing that he thought. “His senses made him conversant only with things externally existing and with his own body, and he transcended his senses only far enough to draw concrete inferences respecting the action of these things.”[61] He is human only when the thought reaches us through articulate speech. Language, as a means of communication between him and his fellows, denotes the existence of the social state, the play of the social evolution which gives the impetus to ideas. Language is the outcome of man’s social needs and nature; he speaks not so much because he thinks and feels as because he must perforce tell his thoughts and feelings to others. And by the richness or poverty of his speech we may assess the richness or poverty of his ideas, since language cannot transcend the thought of which it is the vehicle.

By what tones and gestures, by what signs and grimaces, the beginnings of speech were made, we know not. Countless processions of races appeared and vanished before language had reached a stage when the elements of which words are built up could be separated, and the reason which governed the choice of this and that sound or symbol discovered. Now and again, when a correspondence is found between the roots of terms in use amongst the higher races and the names given by lower races to the same thing, we get nearer primitive thought, the correspondence being not always in sound or spelling, which may be delusive, but in physical or sensible meaning. It would be a wholesome corrective of theories concerning the origin of languages to which many are yet wedded to show that terms not only for things material and concrete, but also for things immaterial and abstract, are of purely physical origin, i.e. have been chosen from their analogy to something real. But the consideration of such matters lies outside the purpose of this work.

Language proves the limited range of ideas among barbaric peoples in the absence of their capacity to generalise. They have a word for every familiar thing, sound, and colour, but no word for animal, plant, sound, or colour as abstract terms. It is the concrete, the special shape and feature and action of a thing, which strike the senses at the outset; to strip it of these accidents, as we call them, and merge it in the general, and realise its relation to what is common to the class to which it belongs, is an effort of which the untutored mind is incapable. Many of the northern non-Aryan tribes, as among the Mongols, have names for the smallest rivulet, but no word for river; names for each finger, but no word for finger. The Society Islanders have a separate name for the tails of various animals, but no name for tail. The Mohicans have verbs for every kind of cutting, but no verb “to cut.” The Australians and other southern aborigines have no generic term for tree, neither have the Malays, yet they have words for the several parts, the root, stem, twig, etc. When the Tasmanians wished to express qualities of things, as hard, soft, warm, long, round, they would say for hard, “like a stone”; for tall, “long legs”; for round, “like the moon,” and so on. Certain hill-tribes of India give names to sunshine, candle, and flames of fire, but “light” is a high abstraction which they are unable to grasp. Some of the Red Race languages have separate verbs for “I wish to eat meat,” or “I wish to eat soup,” but no verb for “I wish.” Of course, the verb “to be,” which, as Adam Smith remarked long ago, is the most abstract and metaphysical of all words, and therefore of no early coinage, is absent from a large number of barbaric languages. Abstract though it be, it is, as Professor Whitney points out, made up of the relics of several verbs which once had, like all elements and parts of speech, a distinct physical meaning. As in “be” and “been” the idea of “growing” is contained, so in “am,” “art,” “is,” and “are,” the idea of “sitting” (or, as some think, of “breathing”) is embodied. As an example of its absence, the Abipones cannot say “I am an Abipone,” only “I Abipone.” Turning to another class of illustration, we have proof what a far cry it is from the savage to the Senior Wrangler in the powerlessness of the former to count beyond his fingers; indeed, he cannot always count as far as that, any number beyond two bewildering him. One of the best stories to the point is given in Mr. Galton’s Tropical South Africa.

“When the Dammaras wish to express four they take to their fingers, which are to them as formidable instruments of calculation as a sliding rule is to an English schoolboy. They puzzle very much after five, because no spare hand remains to grasp and secure the fingers that are required for units. Yet they seldom lose oxen; the way in which they discover the loss of one is not by the number of the herd being diminished, but by the absence of a face they know. When bartering is going on, each sheep must be paid for separately. Thus, suppose two sticks of tobacco to be the rate of exchange for one sheep, it would sorely puzzle a Dammara to take two sheep and give him four sticks. I have done so, and seen a man put two of the sticks apart, and take a sight over them at one of the sheep he was about to sell. Having satisfied himself that that one was honestly paid for, and finding to his surprise that exactly two sticks remained in hand to settle the account for the other sheep, he would be afflicted with doubts; the transaction seemed to come out too “pat” to be correct, and he would refer back to the first couple of sticks; and then his mind got hazy and confused, and wandered from one sheep to the other, and he broke off the transaction until two sticks were put into his hand and one sheep driven away, and then the other two sticks given him and the second sheep driven away. Once while I watched a Dammara floundering hopelessly in a calculation on one side of me, I observed Dinah, my spaniel, equally embarrassed on the other. She was overlooking half a dozen of her new-born puppies, which had been removed two or three times from her, and her anxiety was excessive, as she tried to find out if they were all present, or if any were still missing. She kept puzzling and running her eyes over them, backwards and forwards, but could not satisfy herself. She evidently had a vague notion of counting, but the figure was too large for her brain. Taking the two as they stood, dog and Dammara, the comparison reflected no great honour on the man.”

Dr. Rae says that if an Eskimo is asked the number of his children he is generally puzzled. After counting some time on his fingers he will probably consult his wife, and the two often differ, even though they may not have more than four or five in family. Of the languages of the Australian savages, who are the lowest extant, examined by Mr. Crawfurd, thirty were found to have no number beyond four, all beyond this being spoken of as “many,” whilst the Brazilian Indians got confused in trying to reckon beyond three. The list of such cases might be largely extended, and although exceptions occur where savages are found with a fairly wide range of numbers, notably where barter prevails, the larger proportion of uncivilised people are bewildered at any effort to count beyond three or five. The fingers have, in most cases, determined the limits, for men counted on these before they gave words to the numbers, the words being at last borrowed from the fingers, as in our “five,” which is cognate with the Greek “pente,” and the Persian “pendji” (said to be derived from the word for “hand”), and “digits,” from Latin “digitus,” a finger. This limited power of numeration thus shown to be possessed by the savage justifies the statement that he is nearer to the ape than to the average civilised man, nearer, as the extract from Mr. Galton shows, to the spaniel than to the mathematician. What conception of the succession of time, still less of it as a confluence of the eternities, can he have whose feeble brain cannot grasp a to-morrow! And yet the difference is not one of kind, but of degree, which separates the aborigines of Victoria or Papua from the astronomer who is led by certain irregularities in the motion of a planet to calculate the position of the disturbing cause, and thereby to discover it nearly a thousand million miles beyond in the planet Neptune.

§ III.

BARBARIC CONFUSION BETWEEN NAMES AND THINGS.

Races which have names for different kinds of oaks, but none for an oak, still less for a tree, and who cannot count beyond their fingers, may be expected to have hazy notions concerning the objective and subjective; or, to put these in terms less technical, concerning that which belongs to the object of thought, and that which is to be referred to the thinking subject. Although primitive religion and philosophy are too nearly allied to admit of sharp definitions, the former may be said, if the slang is allowed, to be one of funk, and the latter one of fog. There are those amongst us who say that the terrorism which lies at the base of the one and the mist which is an element of the other, linger yet in extant belief and metaphysics. What man cannot understand he fears; and in all primary beliefs the powers around which seem to him so wayward are baleful, to be appeased by sacrifice or foiled by sorcery. And the confusion which reigns in his cosmos extends to his notion of what is in the mind and what is out of it. He cannot distinguish between an illusion and a reality, between a substance and its image or shadow; and it needs only some bodily ailment, as indigestion through gorging, or delirium through starving, to give to spectres of diseased or morbid origin, airy nothings, a substantive existence, a local habitation, and a name.

The tangle between things and their symbols is well illustrated in the barbaric notion that the name of a man is an integral part of himself, and that to reveal it is to put the owner in the power of another. An Indian asked Kane whether his wish to know his name arose from a desire to steal it; the Araucanians would not allow their names to be told to strangers, lest these should be used in sorcery. So with the Indians of British Columbia; and among the Ojibways husbands and wives never told each other’s names, the children being warned against repeating their own names lest they stop growing. Dobrizhoffer says that the Abipones of Paraguay had the like superstition. They would knock at his door at night, and when asked who was there, no answer would come, through dread of uttering their names. Mr. im Thurn tells us that, although the Indians of British Guiana have an intricate system of names, it is “of little use, in that owners have a very strong objection to telling or using them, apparently on the ground that the name is part of the man, and that he who knows it has part of the owner of that name in his power.” In Borneo the name of a sickly child is changed, to deceive the evil spirits that have tormented it; the Lapps change the baptismal name of a child for the same reason; and among the Abipones, the Fuegians, the Lenguas of Brazil, the North-West Indians, and other tribes at corresponding low levels, when any member died the relatives would change their names to elude Death when he should come to look for them, as well as give their children horrid names to frighten the bad spirits away. All over the barbaric world we find a great horror of naming the dead, lest the ghost appear. An aged Indian of Lake Michigan explained why tales of the spirits were told only in winter, by saying that when the deep snow is on the ground the voices of those repeating their names are muffled; but that in summer the slightest mention of them must be avoided, lest the spirits be offended. Among the Californian tribes the name of the departed spoken inadvertently caused a shudder to pass over all those present. Among the Iroquois the name of a dead man could not be used again in the lifetime of his oldest surviving son without the consent of the latter, and the Australians believe that a dead man’s ghost creeps into the liver of the impious wretch who has dared to utter his name. Dr. Lang tried to get the name of a relative who had been killed from an Australian. “He told me who the lad’s father was, who was his brother, what he was like, how he walked, how he held his tomahawk in his left hand instead of his right, and who were his companions; but the dreaded name never escaped his lips, and I believe no promises or threats could have induced him to utter it.” Dorman gives a pathetic illustration of this superstition in the Shawnee myth of Yellow Sky. “She was a daughter of the tribe, and had dreams which told her she was created for an unheard-of mission. There was a mystery about her being, and none could comprehend the meaning of her evening songs. The paths leading to her father’s lodge were more beaten than those to any other. On one condition alone at last she consented to become a wife, namely, that he who wedded her should never mention her name. If he did, she warned him that a sad calamity would befall him, and he would for ever thereafter regret his thoughtlessness. After a time Yellow Sky sickened and died, and her last words were that her husband might never breathe her name. For five summers he lived in solitude, but, alas, one day as he was by the grave of his dead wife, an Indian asked him whose it was, and in forgetfulness he uttered the forbidden name. He fell to the earth in great pain, and as darkness settled round about him a change came over him. Next morning, near the grave of Yellow Sky a large buck was quietly feeding. It was the unhappy husband.”

The original meaning has dropped out of the current saying, “Talk of the devil and you’ll see his horns,” but savage philosophy recovers it for us. And the shrinking from naming persons is still more marked as we ascend the scale of principalities and powers. In the South Sea Islands not only are the names of chiefs tabooed, but also words and syllables resembling those names in sound. The Tahitians have a custom called Te pi, which consists in avoiding in daily language those words which form a part or the whole of the names of the king and royal family, and in inventing new terms in their place. The king’s name being Tu fetu, “star,” had to be changed into fetia, and tui, “to strike,” became tiai. In New Zealand knives were called nekra, because a chief’s name was Maripi, or “knife.” It is, Professor Max MÜller aptly remarks, as if with the accession of Queen Victoria either the word victory had been tabooed altogether, or only part of it, as tori, so as to make it high treason to speak of Tories during her reign. The secret name of Pocahontas was Matokas, which was concealed from the English through superstitious fear; and in the mythical story of “Hiawatha” the same metonymic practice occurs, his real name being Tarenyawagon. A survival of the dislike to calling exalted temporal, and also spiritual, beings by their names, probably lies at the root of the Jews’ unwillingness to use the name of Yahweh (commonly and incorrectly spelt Jehovah[62]), and in the name “Allah,” which is an epithet or title of the Mohammadan deity, and not the “great name”; whilst the concealment by the Romans of the name of the tutelary deity of their city was fostered by their practice, when besieging any place, to invoke the treacherous aid of its protecting god by offering him a high place in their Pantheon. And in the title of EumenidÊs, or the “gracious ones,” given to the Furies by the Greeks, may be noted a survival of the verbal bribes by which the thing feared was “squared.” For example, the Finnish hunters called the bear “the apple of the forest,” “the beautiful honey-claw,” “the pride of the thicket”; the Laplander speaks of it as “the old man with the fur coat”; in Annam the natives call the tiger “grandfather,” or “lord”; and the Dyaks of Borneo speak of the small-pox as “the chief,” or “jungle leaves.”

The confusion between ideas and objects which these examples illustrate is shared by us, although in a remote degree. If the initials of any well-known name are transposed, for example, let W. E. Gladstone be printed E. W. Gladstone; or if some familiar name is altered, for example, let John Bright be misprinted James Bright, it is curious to note how for a moment the identity is obscured in one’s mind. Another personality, indistinct and bewildering, rises before us, showing how we have come to link together a man and his name even to the details of his initials. That which we feel momentarily the uncivilised feels constantly. He cannot think of himself, of his squaw, of his children, or of his fellow-tribesmen, apart from names which are more significant to him than ours are to us. With us the reason which governed selection is forgotten or obscured, the physical features and conditions no longer correspond to ancestral names; but with barbarous peoples those features and conditions are more apparent. Besides which, children are often named by the medicine-man, and the name is thus endowed with a charm which may roughly be analogous to the halo round a name confirmed by baptism to one simply recorded in the office of a Registrar of Births.

§ IV.

BARBARIC BELIEF IN VIRTUE IN INANIMATE THINGS.

The artificial divisions which man in his pride of birth made between the several classes of phenomena in the inorganic world, and also between the inorganic and the organic, are being swept away before the larger knowledge and insight of our time. Indeed, it would seem that the surest test we can apply to the worth of any kind of knowledge is whether it adds to or takes from our growing conception of unity. If it does the former, we cannot overthrow it; if it does the latter, then is it science “falsely so called.”

That notable doctrine known as the correlation of physical forces, or the convertibility into one another of heat, light, electricity, chemical affinity, etc., each being a mode of manifestation of an unknown energy which “lives through all life, extends through all extent,” has its counterpart in the correlation of spiritual forces. Varied as are the modes of expression of these, that variety is on the surface only. Deep down lies the one source that feeds them, the one heart to whose existence their pulsations witness. All primitive philosophies, all religions “that man did ever find,” are but as the refractions of the same light dispersed through different media; are the result of the speculations of the same subject, allowances being made for local and non-essential differences upon like objects. And, therefore, in treating of the nature and limitations of man’s early thought concerning his surroundings, whether these be the broad earth bathed in the sunshine or swathed in the darkness, or the sounds that come from unseen agents, the sight of spectral visitants of whom he cannot have touch, and out of which are built up his theories of the invisible world, the reader may find reference to the same conditions which were shown in former pages to give birth and sustenance to primitive myth. The same fantastic conclusions, drawn from rude analyses and associations, and from seeming connections of cause and effect, the same bewildering entanglement between things which we know can have nothing in common, meet us; and the same scientific method by which we determine the necessary place of each in the advance of man to truth through illusion is applied.

The illustrations of the vital connection which the savage assumes between himself and his name show how easy is the passage from belief in life inhering in everything to belief in it as capable of power for good or evil. This can be shown by illustrations from more tangible things than names. The savage who is afraid to utter these also shrinks from having his likeness taken, in the feeling that some part of him is transferred, and at the mercy of the sorcerer and enemy. The Malemutes of North America refused to risk their lives before a photographic apparatus. They said that those who had their likenesses had their spirit, and they would not let these pass into the keeping of those who might use them as instruments of torment. Catlin relates that he caused great commotion among the Sioux by drawing one of their chiefs in profile. “Why was half his face left out?” they asked; “Mahtocheega was never ashamed to look a white man in the face.” The chief himself did not take offence, but Shouka the Dog taunted him, saying: “The Englishman knows that you are but half a man; he has painted but one-half of your face, and knows that the rest is good for nothing.” This led to a quarrel, and in the end Mahtocheega was shot, the fatal bullet tearing away just that part of the face which Catlin had not drawn! He had to make his escape, and the matter was not settled till both Shouka and his brother had been killed in revenge for Mahtocheega’s death. The Yanktons accused Catlin of causing a scarcity of buffaloes by putting a great many of them in his book, and refused to let him take their portraits. So with the Araucanians, who ran away if any attempt was made to sketch them. Among such races we find great care exercised lest cuttings of hair, parings of nails, saliva, refuse of food, water in which they had washed, etc., should fall into unfriendly or mistrusted hands. The South Sea Island chiefs had servants following them with spittoons, that the saliva might be buried in some hidden place. Among the Polynesians any one who fell ill attributed it to some sorcerer, who had got hold of refuse from the sick and was burning it, and the quiet of the night was often broken by the blowing of shell-trumpets, as signals for the sorcerer to stop until the gifts on their way to appease him could arrive. The idea is common both to Eskimo and Indian that so long as a fragment of a body remains unburnt, the being, man or beast, may, by magic, be revived from it. As with the name or the portrait, whoever possessed a part of the material substance possessed a part of the spiritual, and in this world-wide belief in a sympathetic connection between things living and not living lies the whole philosophy of sorcery, of charms, amulets, spells, and the general doctrine of luck surviving through the successive stages of culture to this day. And he who would prevent anything from his person getting into hostile hands, naturally sought after things in which coveted qualities were believed to dwell, and avoided those of a reverse nature. So we find tiger’s flesh eaten to give courage, and the eyes of owls swallowed to give good sight in the dark. The Kaffirs prepare a powder made of the dried flesh of various wild beasts, the leopard, tiger, elephant, snake, etc., so as to absorb the several virtues of these creatures. The Tyrolese hunter wears his tuft of eagle’s down to gain long sight and daring, and the Red Indian strings bears claws round his neck to get Bruin’s savage courage. The customs of scalping and, in some measure, of cannibalism, may be referred to the same notion, for the Red man will risk his life to prevent a tribesman’s scalp being captured by the foe, and the New Zealander will swallow the eyes of his slain enemy to improve his sight. In Greenland “a slain man is said to have power to avenge himself upon the murderer by rushing into him, which can only be prevented by eating a piece of his liver.”[63] When a whaler died the Eskimos distributed portions of his dried body among his friends, and rubbed the points of their lances with them, it being held that a weapon thus charmed would pierce a vital part in a whale, where another would fail. Sometimes the body was laid in a cave, and, before starting for the chase, the whalers would assemble, and, carrying it to a stream, plunge it in, and then drink the water. When the heroic Jesuit BrÉbeuf was tortured by the Iroquois, they were so astonished at his endurance that they laid open his breast and came in a crowd to drink the blood of so valiant a foe, thinking to imbibe with it some portion of his courage, while a chief tore out his heart and devoured it.

Cannibalism, it may be remarked, en passant, is also found to have a religious significance, on the supposition, which has unsuspected survival among advanced races, that eating the body and drinking the blood communicates the spirit of the victim to the consumer. It is not always the most savage races who practise it; for example, the Australians, despite the scarcity of large animals for food supply, rarely ate the flesh of man, whilst the New Zealanders, who rank far above them, and had not the like excuse, were systematic feeders on human flesh.

As examples of a reverse kind, but witnessing to the play of like beliefs in qualities passing from brutes and lifeless things, we find some races avoiding oil, lest the game slip through their fingers, abstaining from the flesh of deer, lest it engenders timidity, and from that of pigs and of tortoises lest the eater has very small eyes. Dr. Tylor gives an apposite illustration of a kindred superstition in the Hessian lad who thinks that he may escape the conscription by carrying a baby-girl’s cap in his pocket as a symbolical way of repudiating manhood. So the thief of our London slums hopes to evade the police by carrying a piece of coal or slate in his pocket for luck. Among ourselves there was an old medical saw, “Hare-flesh engendereth melancholy bloude,” and in Swift’s Polite Conversation we have this reason assigned by Lady Answerall when asked to eat it; whilst faith is not yet extinct in the “Doctrine of Signatures,” or the notion that the appearance of a plant indicates the disease for which it is a remedy, as the “eye-bright,” the black purple spot on the corolla of which was said to show that it was good for weak eyes. In referring to the mandrake superstition (a plant whose roots are said to rudely resemble the human form) as illustration of the “recognised principles in magic that things like each other, however superficially, affect each other in a mystic way and possess identical properties,” Mr. Andrew Lang quotes a Melanesian belief that a stone in the shape of a pig, of a bread-fruit, of a yam, was a most valuable find, because it made pigs prolific and fertilised bread-fruit trees and yam-plots.[64]

Brand remarks[65] that the custom of giving infants coral to help in cutting the teeth is said to be a survival of an old belief in it as an amulet; and in English, Sicilian, and West Indian folk-lore, we find the belief that it changes colour in sympathy with the pale or healthy look of the wearer. An old Latin author says,[66] “It putteth of lightenynge, whirle-wynde, tempeste, and storms fro shyppes and houses that it is in.”We are each of us hundreds of thousands of years old, and although our customs and beliefs have a far less venerable antiquity, their sources lie not less in primitive thought. Like the survival of the ancient Roman workman’s “casula” or “little house” or “shelter” in the chasuble of the priest; like the use of stone knives in circumcision long after the discovery of metals; the general tends to become special; the common, its primitive need or service forgotten, to become sacred. Sometimes the early idea abides; the Crees, who carry about the bones of the dead carefully wrapped up as a fetish; the Caribs, who think such relics can answer questions; the Xomanes, who drink the powdered bones in water, that they may receive the spirit; the Algonquins, whose god Manobozho turned bits of his own flesh or his wife’s into raccoons for food; the Iroquois cited above; represent the barbarous ancestry of higher races, whether of the Bacchanalians described by Arnobius,[67] who thought that the fulness of the divine majesty was imparted to them when they tore and ate the struggling rams with mouths dripping with gore, or of the faithful who receive nutriment through the symbols of the Cross. And the prayers of savage and civilised have this in common, that some advantage is thereby sought by the utterer; their sacrifices are alike the giving up of one’s goods or one’s self to a deity who may be appeased or bribed thereby; their fastings are cultivated as inducing the abnormal states in which their old men dream dreams and their young men see visions of spirits appearing as angels ascending and descending between earth and the abode of the blest. Baptisms are the ancient lustrations, which water, as the cleansing element, suggested; and the eastward position, over which priests and ecclesiastics have fought, is the undoubted relic of worship of the rising sun.

In short, there is no rite or ceremony yet practised and revered amongst us which is not the lineal descendant of barbaric thought and usage, expressing a need which, were men less the slaves of custom and indolence, would long since have found loftier form than in genuflexion before shrine and reliquary. By an exercise of imagination not possible but for these being a felicitous “gesture language” of the cries of human souls, a mass of heathen and pagan rites have been transformed into those of the Christian faith. That they have come to be mistaken for the ideas symbolised, that with the loftiest spiritual teaching there should remain commingled belief in miraculous power in fragments (mostly spurious) of dead men and their clothes; only shows the persistency of that notion of a vital connection between the lifeless and the living which this section has sought to illustrate.

§ V.

BARBARIC BELIEF IN THE REALITY OF DREAMS.

The confusion in the barbaric mind between the objective and the subjective, and between the name and the person or thing, which has been illustrated in the foregoing pages, will enable us to see more clearly how the like confusion must enter into the interpretation of such occult and compound phenomena as dreams, and all their kind.

They supply the conditions for exciting and sustaining that feeling of mystery which attends man’s endeavour to get at the meaning of his surroundings. The phantasies which have defiled through the brain in coherent order, or danced in mazy whirl about its sinuous passages when complete sleep was lacking, leave their footprints on the memory, and they are strong of head and heart, true pepticians, like the countryman cited by Carlyle, who, “for his part, had no system,” whose composure on awaking is not affected by the harmonious or discordant, the pleasant or disagreeable, illusions which have made up their dreams. In the felicitous words of Lucretius, “When sleep has chained down our limbs in sweet slumber, and the whole body is sunk in profound repose, yet then we seem to ourselves to be awake and to be moving our limbs, and amid the thick darkness of night we think we see the sun and the daylight; and though in a confined room, we seem to be passing to new climates, seas, rivers, mountains, and to be crossing plains on foot, and to hear voices, though the austere silence of night prevails all round, and to be uttering speech, though quite silent. Many are the other things of this marvellous sort we see, which all seek to shake, as it were, the credit of the senses: quite in vain, since the greatest part of these cases cheat us on account of the mental suppositions which we add of ourselves, taking those things as seen which have not been seen by the senses. For nothing is harder than to separate manifest facts from doubtful, which the mind without hesitation adds on of itself.”[68]

While for us dreams fill an empty moment in the telling, albeit now and again nurturing such remains of superstition as cling to the majority of people, they are to the untrained intelligence, unable to distinguish fact from fiction, or to follow any sequence of ideas, as solid as the experiences of waking moments. As a Zulu, well expressing the limits of savage thought, said to Bishop Callaway, “Our knowledge does not urge us to search out the roots of it, we do not try to see them, if any one thinks ever so little, he soon gives it up, and passes on to what he sees with his eyes; and he does not understand the real state of even what he sees.” Nor does his language clear the confusion within when he tells what he has seen and heard and felt, where he has been and what he has done, for the speech cannot transcend the thought, and therefore can represent neither to himself nor to his hearers the difference between the illusions of the night and the realities of the day. The dead relatives and friends who appear in dreams and live their old life, with whom he joins in the battle, the chase, and the feast, the foes with whom he struggles, the wild beasts from whom he flees, or in whose clutches he feels himself, and with shrieks awakens his squaw, the long distances he travels to sunnier climes lit by a light that never was on land or sea, are all real, and no “baseless fabric of a vision.” That now and again he should have walked in his sleep would confirm the seeming reality; still more so would the intensified form of dreaming called “nightmare,”[69] when hideous spectres sit upon the breast, stopping breath and paralysing motion, and to which is largely due the creation of the vast army of nocturnal demons that fill the folk-lore of the world, and that, under infinite variety of repellent form, have had place in the hierarchy of religions.

Dreams are in the main referred by the savage either to the entrance into him of some outside spirit, as among the Fijians, who believe that the spirit of a living man will leave the body to trouble sleeping folk, or to the real doings of himself.

When the Greenlander dreams of hunting, or fishing, or courting, he believes that the soul quits the body; the Dyaks of Borneo think that during sleep the soul sometimes remains in the body or travels far away, being endowed, whether present or absent, with conditions which in waking moments are lacking. Wherever we find a low state of mental development the like belief exists. In Mr. im Thurn’s elaborate work on the Indians of Guiana we have corroborative evidence, the more valuable because of its freshness. He tells us that the dreams which come to the Indian are to him as real as any of the events of his waking life. To him dream-acts and waking-acts differ only in one respect—namely, that the former are done only by the spirit, the latter are done by the spirit in its body. Seeing other men asleep, and afterwards hearing from them the things which they suppose themselves to have done when asleep, the Indian has no difficulty in reconciling that which he hears with the fact that the bodies of the sleepers were in his sight and motionless throughout the time of supposed action, because he never questions that the spirits, leaving the sleepers, played their part in dream-adventures. Mr. im Thurn illustrates the complete belief of the Indian in the unbroken continuity of his dream-life and waking-life by incidents which came under his own notice, and which are quoted as serving the present argument better than any theorising.

Taking an illustration from nearer home, although from a more remote time, we have in the Scandinavian VatnsdÆla Saga a curious account of three Finns who were shut up in a hut for three nights, and ordered by Ingimund, a Norwegian chief, to visit Iceland, and inform him of the line of the country where he was to settle. Their bodies became rigid, and they sent their souls on their errand, and, on their awaking at the end of three days, gave an accurate account of the VatnsdÆl, in which Ingimund ultimately dwelt. No wonder that in mediÆval times, when witches swept the air and harried the cattle, swooning and other forms of insensibility were adduced in support of the theory of soul-absence, or that we find among savages—as the Tajals of the Luzon islands—objections to waking a sleeper lest the soul happens to be out of the body. As a corollary to this belief in soul-absence, fear arises lest it be prolonged to the peril of the owner, and hence a rough and ready theory of the cause of disease is framed, for savages rarely die in their beds.

§ VI.

BARBARIC THEORY OF DISEASE.

That disease is a derangement of functions interrupting their natural action, and carrying attendant pain as its indication, could not enter the head of the uncivilised: and, indeed, among ourselves a cold or a fever is commonly thought of as an entity in the body which has stolen in, and, having been caught, must be somehow expelled. With the universal primitive belief in spiritual agencies everywhere inhaled with the breath or swallowed with the food or drink, all diseases were regarded as their work, whether, as remarked above, through absence of the rightful spirit or subtle entrance of some hostile one. If these be the causes to which sicknesses are due, obviously the only cure is to get rid of them, and hence the sorcerer and the medicine-man find their services in request in casting out the demon by force, or enticing him by cajolery, or in bringing back the truant soul.

To the savage mind no other explanation of illness is possible than that it is due to the exit of one’s own spirit or to the intrusion of a stronger one, whether of revengeful man or animal. An old Dakota, whose son had sore eyes, said that nearly thirty years before, when the latter was a boy, he fastened a pin to a stick and speared a minnow with it, and it was strange that after so long a time the fish should come to seek revenge. When an Indian is attacked by any wild beast he believes that the avenging Kenaima has transferred his spirit to the animal which seizes him, and if he has even a toothache, of which more presently, then the Kenaima has insinuated himself in the shape of a worm. The tribal chief among the Brazilian natives acts as doctor, and when he visits the sick he asks what animal the patient has offended, and if no cure is effected, the convenient explanation is at hand that the right animal has not been found. At the death of Iron Arms, a noted North American Indian warrior, it was said that he died because the doctor made a mistake, thinking that a prairie-dog had entered him, when it was a mud-hen. In the weird mythology of the Finns the third daughter of the ruler of Tuonela, the underworld, sits on a rock rising from hell-river, beneath which the spirits of all diseases are shut up. As she whirls the rock round like a millstone the spirits escape and go on their torturing errand to mortals. The more abnormal and striking phases of disease manifest when a man is writhing under intense agony, as if torn and twisted by some fiendish living thing, or when in delirium he raves and starts, or when thrown down in epilepsy he struggles convulsively, or when he shivers in an ague, or when in more violent forms of madness he seems endowed with superhuman strength; the various symptoms attending hysteria; each and all support that theory of spirit-influence which survives among advanced races in referring disease to supernatural causes. For the ancient theories of a divine government under which disease is the expression of the anger of the gods, and medicine the token of their healing mercy, and the current notions that any epidemic or pestilence is a visitation of God, are identical in character, however improved in feature, with the barbaric belief illustrated above; and in the ages when belief in the devil as one walking to and fro upon the earth was rampant, he especially was regarded as bringer of both bane and antidote. “He may,” says an old writer, “inflict diseases, which is an effect he may occasion applicando activa passivis (by applying actives to passives), and by the same means he may likewise cure ... and not only may he cure diseases laid on by himself, as Wierus observes, but even natural diseases, since he knows the natural causes and the origin of even those better than the physicians can, who are not present when diseases are contracted, and who, being younger than he, must have less experience.”[71] In Lancashire folk-lore “casting out the ague” was but another name for “casting out the devil”; in the Arabic language the words for epilepsy and possession by demons are the same; and in such phrases as a man being “beside himself,” “transported,” “out of his mind,” or in the converse, as when it is said in the parable of the prodigal son, “he came to himself”; in the words “ecstasy,” which means a displacement or removal of the soul, and “catalepsy,” a seizing of the body by some external power, we have language preserving the primitive ideas of an intruding or departing spirit. Such minor actions as gaping and sneezing confirm the belief. The philosophy of the latter, as Mr. Gill remarks in his Myths and Songs of the South Pacific, is that the spirit having gone travelling about, its return to the body is naturally attended with some difficulty and excitement, occasioning a tingling and enlivening sensation all over the body. And the like explanation lies at the root of the mass of customs attendant on sneezing, and of the superstitions generated by it, which extend through the world.

Williams tells us that among the Fijians, when any one faints or dies, their spirit, it is said, may sometimes be brought back by calling after it, and occasionally the ludicrous scene is witnessed of a stout man lying at full length and bawling out lustily for the return of his soul. So in China, when a child is lying dangerously ill, its mother will go outside into the garden and call its name, in the hope of bringing back the wandering spirit. But for all the ills that flesh is heir to, from hiccupping to madness, from toothache to broken limbs, the patient seldom dares to doctor himself; neither the etiquette of the ordained medicine-man nor the orthodox therapeutics favour that show of independence. The methods adopted by the faculty vary in detail, but they are ruled by a single assumption. When a Chinaman is dying, and the soul is believed to be already out of the body, a relative holds up his coat on a bamboo stick, and a Taoist priest seeks by incantations to bring back the truant soul so that it may re-enter the sick man. Among the Six Nations the Indians sought to discover the intruder by gathering a quantity of ashes and scattering them in the cabin where the sick person was lying. A similar recipe for tracking demons is given in the Talmud; but, as more nearly bearing on the Indian practice, a Polish custom mentioned by Grimm[72] may be quoted. When the white folk torment a sick man a friend walks round him carrying a sieveful of ashes on his back, and lets the ashes run out till the floor round the bed is covered with them. The next morning all the lines in the ashes are counted, and the result told to a wise woman, who prescribes accordingly.

A favourite mode of treatment is blowing upon or sucking the diseased organ, and deception is no infrequent resort when the sorcerer secretes thorns or fishbones, beetles or worms, in his mouth, and then pretends that he has extracted them. Cranz says that the Eskimo old women appear to suck from a swollen leg scraps of leather or a parcel of hair which they have previously crammed into their mouths, and in Australia the same dodge is practised, when the sorcerer makes believe that he has drawn out a piece of bone from the affected part. That toothache is due to a worm is a belief which exists throughout Europe and Asia, and from the Orkneys to New Zealand. Shakspere refers to it in Much Ado about Nothing, Act III. Scene ii.—

Don Pedro. What! sigh for the toothache?
Leonata. Where is but a humour or a worm;

and instances are current of this superstition being acted upon in rural districts, whilst in China the itinerant dentist conceals a worm in the stick which he applies to the aching tooth, and on the stick being gently tapped, the worm wriggles out to the satisfaction of the sufferer. But among barbaric races the treatment of disease is ordinarily the reverse of soothing. Here and there the virtues of some plant have been discovered by accident, and, whilst exalted into a deity in its native home, it has become, like cinchona, a priceless boon to the fever-stricken all over the world; but, speaking broadly, the medicine-man is no Melampus, winning the secret of their healing balm from herb and tree. Nor has he much faith in magic or charm compared to his faith in noise, in incantations, with their accompanying hideous grimaces and gestures, and their deafening yells with clang of instrument to drown the sufferer’s groans and chase away the demon. Not unfrequently, when the patient is kept without food so as to starve out the indwelling enemy, or when the body is pommelled and squeezed to force him out, the remedy helps the disease! An illustration or two from a great mass at command must suffice. Among the Mapuches the sorcerer adopts the canonical howls and grimaces. Making himself as horrible-looking as he can, he begins beating a drum and working himself into a frenzy until he falls to the ground with his breast working convulsively. As soon as he falls, a number of young men outside the hut, who are there to help him in frightening the disease-bringing spirit out of the patient, add their defiant yells, and dash at full speed, with lighted torches, against the hut. If this does not succeed, and the patient dies, the result is attributed to witchcraft. When a Pawnee chief had some ribs and an arm broken, the medicine-men danced round him, and raised their voices from murmurous chants to howls, accompanying the music by blows upon the wounded man’s breast to banish the bad spirit. In olden time this rough-and-tumble business of blows, to which immersion was added, was applied to lunatics in these islands. And, in fact, until some local paper narrates a current superstition, we seldom awaken to the fact how widely the theological explanation of diseases and the empirical choice of remedies still obtains, each being survivals of barbaric theory and practice.

The savage who has more faith, as a curative, in plants that grow on burial-places, and the Christian, who ascribed special healing power to turf and dew from a saint’s grave,[73] differ no whit in kind; and so ingrained was the medicinal belief in virtue inhering in fragments of the dead, that not even the satire of “Reynard the Fox,” telling how the wolf was cured of his earache, and the hare of his fever, the moment that they lay down on the grave of the martyred hen, could give quietus to the notion that grated skulls and sacramental shillings were specifics for the healing of the faithful.

This reference to like practices reminds us how belief in the action of invisible agencies has passed into the practice of confession among advanced races outside Christendom, as in Mexico and Peru. The Roman Catholic priests were not less astonished at finding this in vogue on their arrival in South America than the good Father Huc when, on reaching Tibet, he found shaven monks wearing rosaries, worshipping relics, using holy water, and a grand Lama decked in mitre, cope, and cross.[74] But, as the Italian proverb has it, the world is one country, and “we have all one human heart,” so that the confessional has the like explanation in east as in west. If the disease be the work of an offended deity or of an avenging spirit, let the wrong-doer admit his fault, and trust to him who is credited with influence with the unseen to exorcise the intruder.

§ VII.

BARBARIC THEORY OF A SECOND SELF OR SOUL.

In thus far illustrating the confusion inherent in the barbaric mind between what is and what is not external to itself, the explanation given of matters still dividing philosophers into opposite camps has been hardly indicated. The uniformity of this confusion among the lower intelligence in every zone and age might surprise us, and we should be in bondage to the theory which explains it by assumption of primal intuitions of the race, were we not rejoicing in the freedom of the truth of the doctrine of the descent, or ascent, of man from an ape-like ancestry, and the resulting slow development of his psychical faculties, involving his accounting for motion in things around by the like personal life and will of which he is conscious in himself, and for his regarding the world of great and small alike as the home and haunt of spirits.

For the assumption underlying the savage explanation of such things as dreams and diseases involves a larger assumption—namely, that the spirit which acts thus arbitrarily, playing this game of hide-and-seek, now, as it were, caught up into Paradise, and now dodging its owner and worrying its enemy on earth—is, to quote Mr. Spencer’s appropriate term, a man’s other self. It is, at least, what the scientists call a working hypothesis; it is the only possible explanation which the uncultivated mind can give of what it has not the power to see is a subjective phenomenon. Odd and out-of-the-way events have happened to the dreamer; he has been to strange places and seen strange doings, but waking up, he knows that he is in the same wigwam where he laid down to sleep, and can be convinced by his squaw that he has not moved therefrom all night. Therefore it is the other self, this phantom-soul, which has been away for a time, seeing and taking part in things both new and old. We civilised folk, as Dr. Wendell Holmes remarks, not rarely find our personality doubled in our dreams, and do battle with ourselves, unconscious that we are our own antagonists. Dr. Johnson dreamed that he had a contest with an opponent and got the worst of it; of course, he found the argument for both! Tartini heard the devil play a wonderful sonata, and lay entranced by the arch-fiend’s execution. On waking he seized his violin, and although he could not reproduce the actual succession of notes, he recovered sufficient impressions to compose his celebrated “Devil’s Sonata.” Obviously the devil was no other than Tartini.

Thus the philosopher, to whom dreaming merely indicates a certain amount of uncontrolled mental activity, may satisfy himself; not thus can the savage, who cannot even think that he thinks, and to whom the phenomena of shadows, reflection, and echoes bring confirming evidence of the existence of his mysterious double. What else than a veritable entity can his shadow be to him? Its intangibility feeds his awe and wonder, and increases his bewilderment; its actions, ever corresponding with his own, make it, even more than its outline, a part of himself, the loss of which may be serious. Only when the light is withdrawn or intercepted does the shadow cease to accompany, precede, or follow him, and to lengthen, shorten, or distort itself; whilst not he alone, but all things above and around, have this phantom attendant. The Choctaws believed that each man has an outside shadow, shilombish, and an inside shadow, shilup, both of which survive his decease. Among the Fijians a man’s shadow is called the dark spirit, which goes to the unseen world, while the other spirit, which is his likeness reflected in water or a mirror, stays near the place where he dies. The Basutos are careful, when walking by a river, not to let their shadow fall on the water, lest a crocodile seize it, and harm the owner. Among the Algonquin Indians sickness is accounted for by the patient’s shadow being unsettled or detached from the body; the Zulus say that a corpse cannot cast a shadow, and in the barbaric belief that its loss is baleful, we have the germ of the mediÆval legends of shadowless men and of tales of which Chamisso’s story of Peter Schlemihl is a type. The New England tribes called the soul chemung, the shadow, and in the Quiche and Eskimo languages, as also in the several dialects of Costa Rica, the same word expresses both ideas; while civilised speech indicates community of thought in the skia of the Greeks, the manes or umbra of the Romans, and the shade of our own tongue. Still more complete in the mimicry is the reflection of the body in water or mirror, the image repeating every gesture and adopting every colour, whilst in the echoes which forest and hillside fling back, the savage hears confirmation of his belief in the other self, as well as in the nearness of the spirits of the dead. The Sonora Indians say that departed souls dwell among the caves and nooks of the cliffs, and that the echoes are their voices, and in South Pacific myth echo is the first and parent fairy, to whom at Marquesas divine honours are still paid as the giver of food, and as she who “speaks to the worshippers out of the rocks.” In Greek myth she is punished by Juno for diverting her attention whilst Jupiter flirts with the nymphs, and at last, pining in grief at her unrequited love for Narcissus, there remains nothing but her voice.

But what, in primitive conception, is the more specific nature of the other self, and how does it make the passage from within to without, and vice versÂ? Very early in man’s history he must have wondered at the difference between a waking and a sleeping person, a living and a dead one, and sought wherein this consisted. There lay the body in the repose, more or less broken, of sleep, or in the undisturbed repose of the unawakening sleep; in the latter case, with nothing tangible or visible gone, but that which was once “quick” and warm, which had spoken, moved, smiled, or frowned but a little while before, and which still came in dream or vision, was now cold and still.

It should here be remarked, in passing, that many savage races do not believe in death as a natural event, but regard it as differing from sleep only in the length of time that the spirit is absent from the body. No matter what any one’s age may be, if his death is not caused by wounds, it is attributed to magic, and the search for the sorcerer becomes a family duty, like the vendetta for other injuries. The widespread myths which account for death have as their underlying idea the infraction of some law or custom, for which the offender pays the extreme penalty. And that personification of it which pervades barbaric thought, whilst undergoing many changes of form, yet retains its hold in popular conception as well as in poetry. Pictured as the messenger of Deity, as the awful angel who sought the rebellious and impious, or who, in mission of tenderness, bore the soul to its home in the bosom of the Eternal, it was transformed and degraded by the grotesque fancy of a later time into a grim and dancing skeleton whetting his sickle for ingathering of the young and fair to their doom, or into the grinning skull and crossbones of Christian headstones. So when the maiden Proserpine is plucking the spring flowers, “crocuses and roses and fair violets,” in the Elysian fields, Hades, regent of hell, regardless of her cries, carries her off to his invisible realm.

But to resume. Whilst shadows, reflections, and echoes, one and all, seemed to satisfy the uncivilised mind as to the existence of the other self, they gave no key to its nature, to what it is like. Obviously the difference between death and life lay in some unsubstantial or semi-substantial thing. Perhaps, thought some races, it lies in the blood, with the unchecked outflow of which death ensues, and the idea of this connection has not been confined to barbaric peoples. Perhaps, thought other races, it lies in the heart, which, say the Basutos, has gone out of any one dead, but has returned when the sick have recovered. Among the Greeks some philosophers held that it was fire, which was extinct when the fuel of life was burnt out, or water, which would evaporate away. But, as language shows, it is with the breath that the other self of the savage and the vital principle of the philosopher has been most widely identified. For it is the cessation of breathing which would in the long-run be noted as the unfailing accompaniment of death; and the condensing vapour, as it was exhaled, would confirm the existing theories of a shadowy and gaseous-like soul. In this, as the illustrations to be adduced from various languages will evidence, the continuity of idea which travels along the whole line of barbaric and learned speculation is unbroken.

§ VIII.

BARBARIC PHILOSOPHY IN “PUNCHKIN” AND ALLIED STORIES.

As bearing upon the barbaric belief in the soul leaving the body at pleasure, there is a remarkable group of stories, the central idea of which is the dwelling apart of the soul or heart, as the seat of life, in some secret place, in an egg, or a necklace, or a flower, the good or evil fortunes of the soul involving those of the body. To this group the name of “Punchkin,” the title of one of the older specimens, may conveniently be given. In Miss Frere’s Old Deccan Days it takes the following form.

A Rajah has seven daughters, and his wife dying when they were quite children, he marries the widow of his prime minister. Her cruelty to his children made them run off to a jungle, where seven neighbouring princes, who were out hunting, found them, and each took one of them to wife. After a time they again went hunting, and did not come back. So when the son of the youngest princess, who had also been enchanted away, grew up, he set out in search of his mother and father and uncles, and at last discovered that the seven princes had been turned into stone by the magician Punchkin, who had shut up the princess in a tower because she would not marry him. Recognising her son, she plotted with him to feign agreement to marry Punchkin if he would tell her where the secret of his life was hidden. Overjoyed at her yielding to his wish, the magician told her that it was true that he was not as others.

The princess told her son this, and he set forth on his journey. On the way he rescued some young eagles from a serpent, and the grateful birds carried him until they reached the jungle, where, the genii being overcome with sleep by the heat, the eaglets swooped down. “Down jumped the prince; in an instant he had overthrown the chattees full of water and seized the parrot, which he rolled up in his cloak,” then mounted again into the air and was carried back to Punchkin’s palace. Punchkin was dismayed to see the parrot in the prince’s hands, and asked him to name any price he willed for it, whereupon the prince demanded the restoration of his father and his uncles to life. This was done; then he insisted on Punchkin doing the like to “all whom he had thus imprisoned,” when, at the waving of the magician’s wand, the whole garden became suddenly alive.

“Give me my parrot!” cried Punchkin. Then the boy took hold of the parrot, and tore off one of his wings; and as he did so the magician’s right arm fell off. He then pulled off the parrot’s second wing, and Punchkin’s left arm fell off; then he pulled off the bird’s legs, and down fell the magician’s right leg and left leg. Nothing remained of him save the limbless body and the head; but still he rolled his eyes, and cried, “Give me my parrot!” “Take your parrot, then,” cried the boy, and with that he wrung the bird’s neck, and threw it at the magician, and as he did so, Punchkin’s head twisted round, and, with a fearful groan, he died. Of course, all the rest “lived very happily ever afterwards,” as they do in the plays and the novels.

In the stories of Chundum Rajah, and of Sodewa Bai, the Hindu Cinderella, the heroine’s soul is contained in a string of golden beads. When the Ranee, jealous of her husband’s love for Sodewa Bai, asked her why she always wore the same beads, she replies: “I was born with them round my neck, and the wise men told my father and mother that they contained my soul, and that if any one else wore them I should die.” Whereupon the Ranee instructed her servant to steal the beads from the princess when she slept; then she died, but her body did not decay, and in the end she was restored to life by the recovery of her necklace. In the Bengali tale, Life’s Secret, a Rajah’s favourite wife gives birth miraculously to a boy, whose soul is bound up in a necklace in the stomach of a boal-fish. In both instances the ornaments are stolen, and while they are worn by the thieves, prince and princess alike are lifeless, whilst with the recovery of the beads life returned to each. A not unlike idea occurs in the story, Truth’s Triumph. The children of a village beauty, whom the Rajah had married, are changed into mango trees, to save them from the fury of the jealous Ranee, until the time of danger was past.

In Miss Stokes’ collection of Indian Fairy Tales, we have variants corresponding more closely to Punchkin. In Brave HirÁlÁlbÁsÁ, a Rakshas (the common name for demon) is induced to reveal the secret of his life. He says, “Sixteen miles from here is a tree, round it are tigers and bears and other animals, on the top of it is a large flat snake, on the head of which is a bird in a cage, and my soul is in that bird.” By enchantment HirÁlÁlbÁsÁ reached the tree and secured the cage. He pulled the bird’s limbs off, and the Rakshas’ arms and legs fell off; then he wrung its neck, and the Rakshas fell dead. And in the tale of The Demon and the King’s Son, from the same collection, the prince falls in love with the monster’s daughter, who is dead during the day and alive in the night. The prince asks what she would do, if whilst she is dead, her father were to be killed? She tells him it is impossible for any one to kill her father, for his life is in a mainÁ (starling), which is in a nest in a tree on the other side of the sea, and if, she adds, any one in killing the bird spilt the blood on the ground, a hundred demons would be born from it. The prince reached the other side, and taking the mainÁ, proceeded to kill it, but first wrapt it in his handkerchief, that no blood might be spilt. The demon, who was far away, knew that the bird was caught, and he set out at once to avert his doom. The story ends, like the preceding one, with the dismemberment of the bird, and the consequent death of the demon.

The nearest approach to tales similar to these in the Buddhist Birth-stories, is in one or two isolated cases, when the Karma of a human being is spoken of as immediately transferred to an animal.

In Tales from the Norse the one in most striking correspondence with the Punchkin group is that of The giant who had no heart in his body. The monster turns six princes and their wives into stone, whereupon the seventh and only surviving son, Boots, sets out to avenge their fate. On his journey he saves the lives of a raven, a salmon, and a wolf, and the wolf, having eaten his horse, compensates Boots by carrying him to the giant’s castle, where the lovely princess who is to be his bride is confined. She promises to find out where the giant keeps his heart, and by blandishments and divers arts known to the fair sex both before and since the time of Delilah, she worms out the secret. He tells her that “far, far away in a lake lies an island; on that island stands a church; in that church is a well; in that well swims a duck; in that duck is an egg; and in that egg lies my heart, you darling!” Boots, taking fond farewell of the princess, rides on the wolf’s back to the island. Then the raven he had befriended flies to the steeple and fetches the key of the church; the salmon, in like return for kindness, brings him the egg from the well where the duck had dropped it.

AsbjÖrnsen’s New Series gives a variant in which a Troll who has seized a princess tells her that he and all his companions will burst, as did the heartless giant, when there passes above them “the grain of sand that lies under the ninth tongue in the ninth head” of a certain dragon. The grain of sand is found and passed over them, when the Troll and all his brood are destroyed. In the Gaelic stories, for which we are indebted to the skill of an early worker in this field, the late Mr. J. F. Campbell, that of the Young King of Easaidh Ruadh locates the secret thus: “There is a great flagstone underneath the threshold. There is a wether under the flagstone. There is a duck in the wether’s belly, and an egg in the duck, in the egg is my soul.” In the Sea-Maiden there is a “great beast with three heads, which cannot be killed until an egg is broken which is in the mouth of a trout, which springs out of a crow, which flies out of a hind, which lives on an island in the middle of the loch.”

In his valuable collection of Russian Folk-Tales, which is enriched by comparative notes, Mr. Ralston supplies some interesting variants of Punchkin. Koshchei, called “the immortal or deathless,” is merely one of the many incarnations of the dark spirit which takes so many monstrous shapes in folk-tales. Sometimes his death, that is, the object with which his life is indissolubly connected, does exist within his body. In one story he carries off a queen, for whom her three sons, one after another, go in search. Prince Ivan, the youngest, at last discovers where his mother dwells, and she at the approach of Koshchei hides her son away. The monster sniffs the blood of a Russian, and inquires if her son has not been with her. She assures him it is only the Russian air in his nostrils. Then after talking to him affectionately on one thing and another, she asks where his death is, and he tells her that, “under an oak is a casket, in the casket is a hare, in the hare is a duck, in the duck an egg, in the egg is my death.” Prince Ivan found the egg, and reached his mother’s house with it. Presently Koshchei flew in and said, “Phoo, phoo; no Russian bone can the ear hear or the eye see, but there’s a smell of Russia here.” Then Prince Ivan came out from his hiding place, and, holding up the egg, said, “There is your death, oh Koshchei!” then he smashed it, and Koshchei fell dead. In another story Koshchei is killed by a blow on the forehead from the mysterious egg. Mr. Ralston also quotes a Transylvanian Saxon story concerning a witch’s life, which is a light burning in an egg inside a duck that swims on a pond inside a mountain, and she dies when the light is put out. In the Bohemian story of the Sun-horse a warlock’s strength lies in an egg in a duck, which is within a stag under a tree. A seer finds the egg and sucks it. Then the warlock becomes as weak as a child, “for all his strength had passed into the seer.”

In Servian folk-tale the strength of a baleful being who had stolen a princess lies in a bird which is inside the heart of a fox, and when the bird was taken out of the heart and set on fire, that moment the wife-stealer falls down dead, and the prince regains his bride. From the same source we have the tale of the Golden-haired Twins, with an incident akin to that in Punchkin. When the king’s stepmother buries the twins whom she had stolen, there spring from the spot where they lie trees with golden leaves and blossoms. The king’s admiration of them aroused her jealousy, and she had them cut down, but eventually his golden-haired princes are restored to him.

Thus far the illustrations have been drawn solely from the folk-tales of the widespread Indo-European races, but they are not confined to these. From non-Aryan sources we have the Tatar story of the demon-giant who kept his soul in a twelve-headed snake carried in a bag on his horse’s back. The hero finds out the secret, kills the snake, and the giant dies. In one of the Samoyed tales a man had no heart in his body, and could recover it only on restoring to life a woman whom he had killed. Then the man said to his wife, “Go to the place where the dead lies; there you will find a purse, in that purse is her soul; shake the purse over her bones, and she will come to life.” The wife did as she was ordered, and the woman revived, whereupon her son dashed the heart to the ground, and the man died.[75]

More elaborate than these are the tales from The Thousand and One Nights. In Seyf-el-Mulook the jinnee’s soul is enclosed in the crop of a sparrow, and the sparrow is imprisoned in a small box, and this is in seven other boxes which are put into seven chests; these are enclosed in a coffer of marble that is sunk in the ocean surrounding the world. By the aid of Suleyman’s seal-ring Seyf-el-Mulook raises the coffer, and extricating the sparrow, strangles it, whereupon the jinnee’s body is converted into a heap of black ashes. In some tales not included by Galland or Lane, which Mr. Kirby has translated and edited under the title of the New Arabian Nights, we have a variant of the above under the title of Joadar of Cairo and Mahmood of Tunis. Joadar is bent on releasing his enchanted betrothed, which he does by also strangling a sparrow, the ogre being simultaneously dissolved into a heap of ashes.

The most venerable illustration of the leading idea in the Punchkin group is however found, though in more subtle form, in the Egyptian tale of the Two Brothers. This is of great value on account of its high antiquity, and, moreover, specially interesting as recording an incident similar to that narrated in the life of Joseph. It is contained in the D’Orbiney papyrus preserved in the BibliothÈque ImpÉriale, the date being about the fourteenth or fifteenth century B.C.

There were two brothers, Anepou and Satou, joined as one in love and labour. One day Satou was sent to fetch seed-corn from Anepou’s house, where he found his brother’s wife adorning her hair. She urged him to stay with her, but he refused, promising, however, to keep her wickedness secret. When Anepou returned at even, she, being afraid, “made herself to seem as a woman that had suffered violence,” and told him exactly the reverse of what had happened. Anepou’s wrath was kindled against Satou, and he went out to slay him; but Satou called on Phra to save him, and the god placed a river between the brothers, so that when day dawned Anepou might hear the truth. At sunrise Satou tells his story, and, mutilating himself, he says that he will leave Anepou and go to the valley of the cedar, in the cones of which he will deposit his heart, “so that if the tree be cut his heart will fall to the earth, and he must die.”For us the value of these folk-tales lies in the relics of barbaric notions concerning the nature of man and his relation to external things which they preserve. They have amused our youth-hood; they may instruct our manhood. But if we go to the solar mythologists for their interpretation, we shall learn from Sir G. W. Cox that the “magician Punchkin and the heartless giant are only other forms of the Panis who steal bright treasures from the gleaming west,” that “Balna herself is Helen shut up in Ilion ... the eagles the bright clouds,”[76] and from Professor de Gubernatis that the duck is the dawn and the egg the sun.

These venerable tales have a larger, richer meaning than this, expressive of the wonder deep-seated in the heart of man. Like the “drusy” cavity in granite rock which, when broken open, reveals beautiful prisms of topaz and beryl, the folk-tales disclose under analysis that thought, now crystallised, which confuses ideas and objects, illusions and realities, substances and shadows.

§ IX.

BARBARIC AND CIVILISED NOTIONS OF THE SOUL’S NATURE.

In proof of the closing remarks in § VII., that the breath has given the chief name to the soul, we find the Western Australians using the same word, waug, for “breath, spirit, soul”; in Java the word nawa is used for “health, life, soul”; in the Dakota tongue niya is literally “breath,” figuratively “life”; in Netela piuts is “breath” and “soul”; in Eskimo silla means “air” and “wind,” and is also the word that conveys the highest idea of the world as a whole, and of the reasoning faculty. The supreme existence they call Sillam Innua, Owner of the Air, or of the All; in the Yakama tongue of Oregon wkrisha signifies “there is wind,” wkrishwit, “life”; with the Aztecs ehecatl expressed “air, life, and the soul,” and, personified in their myths, it was said to have been born of the breath of Tezcatlipoca, their highest divinity, who himself is often called Yoalliehecatl, the Wind of Night.[77] This identity of wind with breath, of breath with spirit, and thence of spirit with the Great Spirit, which

“Sees God in clouds, and hears Him in the wind,”

has further illustration in the legends of the Quiches, in which the unknown creative power is Hurakan, a name familiar to us under the form hurricane, and in our own sacred records, where the advent of the Holy Spirit is described “as of a rushing mighty wind.” In the Mohawk language atonritz, the “soul,” is from atonrion, “to breathe”; whilst, as showing the analogy between the effects of restricted sense and restricted civilisation, Dr. Tylor quotes the case of a girl who was a deaf-mute as well as blind, and who, when telling a dream in gesture language, said: “I thought God took away my breath to heaven.” Among the higher languages the same evidence abides.

“The spirit doth but mean the breath.”

That word spirit is derived from a verb spirare, which means “to draw breath.” Animus, “the mind,” is cognate with anima, “air”; in Irish, which belongs to the same family of speech as Latin, namely, the Aryan or Indo-European, we have anal, “breath,” and anam, “life,” or “soul”; and in Sanskrit we find the root an, to “blow” or “breathe,” whence anila, “wind,” and in Greek anemos, with the like meaning. In Hampole’s Ayenbite of Inwyt, i.e. “Prick or Remorse of Conscience,” a poem of the fourteenth century, we find ande or “breath” used as “soul.”

“Thus sall ilka saul other se (i.e. in the other world)
For nan of tham may feled be
Na mar than here a man, ande may
When it passes fra his mouthe away.”[78]

The Greek psyche, pneuma, and thymos, each meaning “soul” and “spirit,” are from roots expressing the wind or breath. In Slavonic the root du has developed the meaning of breath into that of soul or spirit, and the dialect of the gipsies has duk with the meanings of breath, spirit, ghost. That word ghost, the German geist, the Dutch geest, from a root meaning “to blow with violence,” is connected with gust, gas, geyser; in Scandinavian, glÖsor, “to pour forth.” In non-Aryan languages, as the Finnish, far means “soul, breath, spirit, wind”; henki, “spirit, person, breath, air”; the Hebrew nephesh, “breath,” has also the meanings of “life, soul, mind”; and ruach and neshamah, to which the Arabic nefs and ruh correspond, pass from meaning “breath” to “spirit.” The legend of man’s creation records that he became a living soul through God breathing into his nostrils “the breath of life,” and concerning this the Psalmist says of all that live, “Thou takest away their breath, they die, and return unto the dust.” As a final illustration, the Egyptian kneph has the alternative meanings of “life” and “breath.”[79]

When we pass from names to descriptions, we find the same underlying idea of the ethereal nature of spirit. The natives of Nicaragua, California, and other countries remote from these, agree in describing the other self as air or breeze, which passes in and out through the mouth and nostrils. The Tongans conceived it as the aËriform part of the body, related to it as the perfume to the flower. The Greenlanders describe it as pale and soft, as without flesh and bone, so that he who tries to seize it grasps nothing. The Lapps say that the ghosts are invisible to all but the Shamans. The Congo negroes leave the house of the dead unswept for a year, lest the dust should injure the delicate substance of the ghost; and the German peasants have a saying that a door should not be slammed, lest a soul gets pinched in it. In some parts of Northern Europe, when the wind-god, Odin, rides the sky with his furious spectral host, the peasants open the windows of every sick-room that the soul of the dying may have free exit to join the wild chase; whilst both here and in France it is still no uncommon practice to open doors and windows that the soul may depart quickly. Dr. Tylor[80] cites a passage from Hampole, in which the author speaks of the intenser suffering which the soul undergoes in purgatory by reason of its delicate organisation.

“The soul is more tendre and nesche (soft)
Than the bodi that hath bones and fleysche;
Thanne the soul that is so tendere of kinde,
Mote nedis hure penaunce hardere-y-finde,
Than eni bodi that evere on live was,”

a doctrine clearly due to Patristic theories of incorporeal souls. And a modern poet, Dante Rossetti, in his Blessed Damozel, when he describes her as leaning out from the gold bar of heaven and looking down towards the earth, that “spins like a fretful midge,” whence she awaits the coming of her lover, depicts the souls mounting up to God as passing by her “like thin flames.” The Greeks and, following them, the Romans, conceived the soul as of thin, impalpable texture, as exhaled with the dying breath, or, as in Homer, rushing out through the wound that causes the warrior’s death. In the metaphysical Arabian romance of Yokdhan, the hero seeks the source of life and thought, and discovers in one of the cavities of the heart a bluish vapour, which was the living soul. Among the Hebrews it was of shadowy nature, with echoless motion, haunting a ghostly realm:

“It is a land of shadows; yea, the land
Itself is but a shadow, and the race
That dwell therein are voices, forms of forms.”

Such conceptions are but little varied; and, to this day, the intelligence of the major number of people who think about the thing at all presents the departing soul as something vaporous, as a little white cloud.

In keeping with such ideas, the belief in transfer of spirit expresses itself. Algonquin women who desired to become mothers flocked to the couch of those about to die, in hope that the vital principle as it passed from the body would enter theirs. Among the Seminoles of Florida, when a woman died in childbirth, the infant was held over her face to receive her parting spirit, and thus acquire strength and knowledge for its future use. So among the TÁkahlis, the priest is accustomed to lay his hand on the head of the nearest relative of the deceased, and to blow into him the soul of the departed, which is supposed to come to life in his next child.[81]

In Harland and Wilkinson’s Lancashire Folk-lore it is related that while a well-known witch lay dying, “she must needs, before she could ‘shuffle off this mortal coil,’ transfer her familiar spirit to some trusty successor. An intimate acquaintance from a neighbouring township was consequently sent for in all haste, and on her arrival was immediately closeted with her dying friend. What passed between them has never fully transpired, but it is asserted that at the close of the interview this associate received the witch’s last breath into her mouth, and with it her familiar spirit. The powers for good or evil of the dreaded woman were thus transferred to her companion, and on passing along the road from Burnley to Blackburn we can point out a farmhouse at no great distance, with whose thrifty matron no neighbouring farmer will yet dare to quarrel.” When a Roman lay at the point of death, his nearest relative inhaled the last breath; in New Testament story, the risen Jesus breathes on His disciples, that they may receive the Holy Spirit, and the form thus adopted in conferring supernatural grace is still used in the rites and ceremonies of the Catholic Church.

Speculation about the other self could not, however, stop at identifying it with a man’s breath or shadow, or with regarding it as absolutely impalpable. These nebulous and gaseous theories necessarily condensed, as it were, into theories of semi-substantiality still charged with ethereal conceptions, but giving embodiment to the soul to account for the appearances of both dead and living in dreams, when their persons were clasped, their forms and features seen, and their voices heard.

Such theories involve a kind of continuity of identity, and often take the form of belief in the soul as a replica of the body, and as suffering corresponding mutilation. When the native Australian has slain his foe, he cuts off his right thumb, so as to prevent him from throwing a shadowy spear; the Chinese dread of decapitation, lest their spirits are headless, is well known; but a more telling illustration is that cited by Dr. Tylor, from Waitz, of the West Indian planter, whose slaves sought refuge from the lash and toil in suicide. But he was too cunning for them; he cut off the heads and hands of the corpses, that the survivors might see that not even death could save them from a taskmaster who could maim their souls in the next world. Among advanced nations the same conceptions survived. Achilles, resting by the shore, sees the dead Patroclus in a dream. “Ay me, there remaineth then, even in the house of Hades, a spirit and phantom of the dead, albeit the life be not anywise therein; for all night long hath the ghost of hapless Patroclus stood over me, wailing and making moan, and wondrous like his living self it seemed.”[82] Virgil portrays Æneas, and Homer describes Ulysses, as recognising their old comrades when they enter the “viewless shades,” where the dwellers continue the tasks of their earthly life. In Hebrew legend Saul recognises the shade of Samuel when the magic spell of the Witch of Endor evokes it, although the grave of the old “judge” was sixty miles away. The monarch-shades of “Sheol” hail with derision the entrance of the King of Babylon among them. In New Testament narrative the risen Jesus is alternately material and spiritual, now passing through closed doors, and now submitting his wound-prints to the touch of the doubter. In Hamlet the ghost is as “the air, invulnerable,” yet “like a king” ...

“... that fair and warlike form
In which the majesty of buried Denmark
Did sometimes march.”

Notions of material punishments and rewards involved notions of a material soul, even pending its reunion with the body at the general resurrection. The angels are depicted as weighing souls in a literal balance, while devils clinging to the scales endeavour to disturb the equilibrium.[83] In some frescoes of the fourteenth century, on the walls of the Campo Santo, at Pisa, illustrations of these notions abound; the soul is portrayed as a sexless child rising out of the mouth of the corpse, and eagerly awaited as the crown of rejoicing of the angels, or as the lawful prey of the demons. After this it is amusing to learn that extreme tests of the weight of ghosts are now and then forthcoming,[84] from the assertion of a Basuto divine that the late queen had been bestriding his shoulders, and he never felt such a weight in his life, to the alleged modern spiritualistic reckoning of the weight of a human soul at from three to four ounces! And do not spirit-photographs adorn the albums of the credulous?

§ X.

BARBARIC BELIEF IN SOULS IN BRUTES AND PLANTS AND LIFELESS THINGS.

More graceful is the conception which makes the soul spring up as a flower or cleave the air as a bird. It is, of course, the purified survival of the primitive thought which did not limit its belief in an indwelling spirit to man, but extended it to brutes and plants, and even to lifeless things. For the lower creatures manifested the phenomena from which the belief in spirits in higher creatures was inferred. They moved and breathed, their life ceased with their breath; they cast shadows and reflections; their cries, which to the savage seemed so like human speech,[85] awakened echoes; and they appeared in dreams. Among the western tribes of North America the phantoms of all animals are supposed to go to the happy beasts’ grounds, and in Assam the ghosts of those slain become the property of the hunter who kills them; whilst the custom of begging pardon of the animal before or after despatching it, as among the Red Indians, who even put the pipe of peace in the dead creature’s mouth, further evidences to barbarian belief in beast-souls. Although the belief in the immortality of brutes has now no place in serious philosophy, it has been a favourite doctrine from the Kamchadales, who believe in the after-life of flies and bugs, to the eminent naturalist Agassiz, who advocates the doctrine in his Essay on Classification; and in a list of 4977 books on the nature and future of the soul given in Mr. Alger’s elaborate critical history of the subject, nearly 200 deal with the after-life of animals. The advocates have often felt the difficulty of granting this after-life to man and denying it to creatures to which he stands so closely related in ultimate community of origin; but science, while it finds links of sympathy with the ideas of rude races respecting the common life of all that moves, and presents evidence in support of the common destiny, lends no support to the doctrine of the immortality of oysters. The custom of apologising to doomed brutes is practised in regard to plants. If they exhibit the phenomena of life in a lesser degree, enough are shown to justify the accrediting of them with souls. Besides flinging wavy shadows and reflections (and it cannot be too often enforced that to the barbaric intelligence motion is a prime sign of life), they are not voiceless. Murmurs are heard in their leaves; sounds echo from their hollow trunks, or tremble, Æolian-like, through their branches; and in their juices are the sources of repose or frenzy.

“The Ojibways believed that trees had souls, and in pagan times they seldom cut down green or living trees, for they thought it put them to pain. They pretended to hear the wailing of the trees when they suffered in this way. On account of these noises, real or imaginary, trees have had spirits assigned them, and worship offered to them. A mountain-ash, in the vicinity of South Ste. Marie, which made a noise, had offerings piled up around it. If a tree should emit from its hollow trunk or branches a sound during a calm state of the atmosphere, or should any one fancy such sounds, the tree would be at once reported, and soon come to be regarded as the residence of some local god.”[86] As expressed in Greek myth, purified in this case from grosser elements, we have the Dryades, who were believed to die together with the trees in which their life had begun to be, and in which they had dwelt. As expressed in folk-lore and its poetic forms, it is in the growth or blossoming of flowers, or the intertwining of branches, that the idea survives. In the ballad of “Fair Margaret and Sweet William”—

“Out of her brest there sprang a rose,
And out of his a briar;
They grew till they grew unto the church-top,
And there they tyed in a true lover’s knot;”[87]in the story of “Tristram and Ysonde,” “from his grave there grew an eglantine which twined about the statue, a marvel for all men to see; and, though three times they cut it down, it grew again, and ever wound its arms about the image of the fair Ysonde;”[88] while the conception often lends itself to the poet’s thoughts, from Laertes’ words over Ophelia:—

“Lay her i’ the earth,
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring,”

to Tennyson’s

“And from his ashes may be made
The violet of his native land.”

In Grimm’s Teutonic Mythology a number of illustrations are supplied of the vagaries of popular imagination, which picture the soul as a bird flying out of a dead person’s mouth, and, as a cognate example from rude culture, we find a belief among the Powhatans that “a certain small wood bird received the souls of their princes at death, and they religiously refrained from doing it harm; while the Aztecs and various other nations thought that all good people, as a reward of merit, were metamorphosed at the close of life into feathered songsters of the grove, and in this form passed a certain term in the umbrageous bowers of Paradise.”[89] But many pages might be filled with examples of varying conceptions of the soul, the major number of which (for the idea of it as a mouse, snake, etc., must not be forgotten) have as their nucleus its ethereal nature and freedom from the limitations of solid earth, although round that nucleus gather some more concrete ideas for the mind, desiring something more substantial than symbols, to grasp. The belief that inanimate things as well as animals and plants have a dual being is not so obvious at first sight, and yet, given the reasons for the latter, there are as good grounds, because like in kind, for the former. The Algonquins told Father Charlevoix that “since hatchets and kettles have shadows, as well as men and women, it follows that these shadows must pass along with human shadows into the spirit-land.” When the tools or weapons are injured or done with, their souls must cross the water to the Great Village, where the sun sets. Besides, spears and pots and pans, as well as men and dogs, appear in dreams; they throw shadows and images in the water, they give forth a sound when struck, and, as the Fijians also argue, “if an animal or plant die, its soul goes to Bolotoo; if a stone or anything else is broken, it has its reward there; nay, has equal good luck with men and hogs and yams. If an axe or a chisel is worn out or broken up, away flies its soul for the service of the gods.” Logically, the savage who believes that in the other world

“The hunter still the deer pursues,
The hunter and the deer a shade,”

must put in the hands of the one a shadow spear. So when an Ojibway chief, after a four days’ trance, gave an account of his visit to the land of shadows, he told of the hosts whom he had met travelling there laden with pipes and kettles and weapons. These primitive ideas explain, once and for all, matters which have too often been explained by fanciful theories, or cited as evidences of the benighted condition of those places which on missionary maps of the world are painted black. They disclose the reason why food and utensils and weapons were broken and buried with the dead; why fires were lighted round the grave; why animals were slain on the death of a chief; why the Greenlanders, when a child dies, bury a dog with him, because the dog, they say, is able to find his way anywhere; why North American Indian mothers in pathetic custom drop their milk on the lips of the dead child; and why, what seemed so inexplicable to the early missionaries to the East, ignorant of the practice of widow-sacrifice among the ancient peoples of the West, as the Gauls, Teutons, and others, wives and slaves were burned on the funeral pyre. Among the Mexicans sometimes a very rich man would even have his chaplain slaughtered, that he might not be deprived of his support in the other world.

In their initial stage all these gifts are made, all these rites performed, for the supposed need of the dead. Every one had his manes, which followed him into the next world, and, lacking which, he would be as poor as if in this world he had lacked it. The spiritual counterpart of the offerings was consumed by his spirit, just as the old deities were thought to enjoy the sweet-smelling savour of the burnt sacrifices; the fires were kindled that the soul might not grope about in darkness. So the obolus was put into the mouth of the dead, that its manes might be payment to Charon for the ferry of the Styx, as money is put in the corpse’s hand or mouth among the German and Irish peasants to this day; so the warrior’s horse was slain at his tomb and the armour laid therein, that he might enter Valhalla riding, and clothed with the tokens of his right to the abode reserved for those who had fallen in battle.

Any explanation of customs like the foregoing, persistent as they are in kind, however varying in expression, is defective which does not take into account what large part the emotions play in all that is connected with death, and how they infuse such customs with vitality. The bereaved refuse to believe that those whom they have lost have no more concern in the interests of life once common and dear to both. As among the Dakotas, when a mother feels a pain at her breast, they say that her dead child is thinking of her. The place where the body lies becomes the connecting link between it and the soul which is still the solicitude and care, or, it may be, the dread of the living; succouring and protecting, or, on the other hand, avenging.

The element of dread undoubtedly comes into play early. The awe which we feel in the presence of death, or in passing in the dark through a churchyard, takes in the savage the form of terror. The behaviour of the ghost in dreams, its ability to do what men still in the flesh cannot do, quicken the belief in occult power, and the desire to propitiate it. Among the Lapps red-hot stones are cast behind the coffins of the dead, and their graves fenced round to prevent their return to earth. The articles placed in the grave as gifts for the dead become sacrifices laid on the altar to appease malignant spirits; the mound or tomb becomes a temple, and awe passes by easy degrees into worship. The prevalence in one form or another of ancestor-worship has, as remarked already, led Mr. Spencer to the conclusion that it is the rudimentary form of all religions; even sun, moon, volcano, river, etc., being feared and adored because they were believed to be the dwelling-places of ancestral ghosts. The facts are against this theory. It is to the larger, the more impressive phenomena of the natural world, the sun in noontide strength and splendour, the lightning and the thunder, that we must look for the primary causes which awakened the fear, the wonder, and the adoration in which lie the germs of the highest religions. Such causes are not only sufficient, but more operative on the undeveloped intelligence than the belief in ancestral spirits of the mountain and the sea, which involves a more complex mental action.[90] The one is contributory, but subordinate, to the other. It is, as M. RÉville remarks, “the phenomena of nature regarded as animated and conscious that wake and stimulate the religious sentiments, and become the objects of the adoration of man.... If nature-worship, with the animism that it engenders,[91] shapes the first law to which nascent religion submits in the human race, anthropomorphism furnishes the second, disengaging itself ever more and more completely from the zoomorphism which generally serves as an intermediary. This is so everywhere.”[92]

§ XI.

BARBARIC AND CIVILISED NOTIONS ABOUT THE SOUL’S DWELLING-PLACE.

The existence of the ghost-soul or other self being unquestioned, the inquiry follows, where does it dwell? Like the trolls of Norse myth, who burst at sunrise, the flitting spirit vanishes in the light and comes with the darkness; but what places does it haunt when the quiet of the night is unbroken by its intrusion, and where are they?

The answers to these are as varied as the vagaries of rude imagination permit. We must not expect to find any theories of the soul’s prolonged after-existence among races who have but a dim remembrance of yesterday, and but a hazy conception of a to-morrow. Neither, among such, any theories of the soul abiding in a place of reward or punishment, as the result of things done in the body. Speaking of the heaven of the Red man, Dr. Brinton remarks that “nowhere was any well-defined doctrine that moral turpitude was judged and punished in the next world. No contrast is discoverable between a place of torment and a realm of joy; at the worst but a negative castigation awaited the liar, the coward, or the niggard.” Ideas of a devil and a hell are altogether absent from the barbaric mind, since it is obvious that any theory of retribution could arise only when man’s moral nature had so developed as to awaken questions about the government of the universe, and to call another world into existence to redress the wrongs and balance the injustices of this. His earliest queries were concerned with the whereabouts of the soul more than with its destiny, and it was, and still is, among the lower races, thought of as haunting its old abode or the burial-place of its body, and as acting very much as it had acted when in the flesh. The shade of the Algonquin hunter chases the spirits of the beaver and the elk with the spirits of his bow and arrow, and stalks on the spirits of his snow-shoes over the spirit of the snow. Among the Costa Ricans the spirits of the dead are supposed to remain near their bodies for a year, and the explorer Swan relates that when he was with the North-Western Indians he was not allowed to attend a funeral, lest he offended the spirits hovering round; whilst the Indians of North America often destroy or abandon the dwellings of the dead, the object being to prevent the ghost from returning, or to leave it free so to do. But it is needless to multiply illustrations of a belief which has been persistent in the human mind from the dawn of speculation about the future of the soul to the present day. The barbarians who think that the spirits of the dead move and have their being near the living, join them on their journeys, and sit down, unseen visitants, at their feasts (to be driven off, as among the Eskimos, by blowing the breath), are one with the multitudes of folks in Europe and America who, sorrowing over their dead, think of them as ministering with unfelt hands, and as keenly interested in their concerns.

“We meet them at the doorway, on the stair,
Along the passages they come and go,
Impalpable impressions on the air,
A sense of something moving to and fro.”

The Ojibway, who detects their tiny voices in the insect’s hum, and thinks of them as sheltering themselves from the rain by thousands in a flower, as sporting by myriads on a sunbeam, is one with the Schoolmen who speculated on the number of angels that could dance on a needle’s point, and with Milton in his poetic rendering of the belief of his time, that

“Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.”

The Hottentot who avoids a dead man’s hut lest the ghost be within, is one with the believers in haunted houses, in banshees, wraiths, and spectres. Such as he should not be excluded as “corresponding members” of the Society for Psychical Research in the invitations[93] which its committee issues to folks who have seen apparitions, and slept, or tried to sleep, in the dreaded chamber of some moated hall of mystery.

If we look in vain for any consistency of idea or logical relation in barbaric notions, our wonder ceases at the absence of these when we note the conflicting conceptions entertained among intelligent people. But the underlying thought is identical. The examples given in a foregoing section on the belief in the passage of the soul into other human bodies, into animals and stones, strengthened as this is by the likeness in mind and body between children and dead relatives, by the human expression noted on many a brute, by the human shape of many a stone, show how the theory of the soul as nigh at hand finds many-sided support. In this belief, too, lie the germs of theories of successive transmigrations elaborated in the faiths of advanced races, when the defects of body and character were explained as the effects of sin committed in a former existence.Next in order of conception appears to be that of the soul as living an independent existence, an improved edition of the present, in an under or upper world, into which the dead pass without distinction of caste or worth.

The things dreamed about respecting the land of spirits and their occupations are woven of the materials of daily life. Whether to the sleeping barbarian in his wigwam, or to the seer banished in Patmos; whether to the Indian travelling in his dreams to the happy hunting-ground, or to the apostle caught up in trance into paradise; earth, and earth alone, supplies the materials out of which man everywhere has shaped his heaven. Her dinted and furrowed surface; valleys and mountain-tops; islands sleeping in summer seas, or fretted by winter storms; cities walled and battlemented; glories of sunrise and sunset; gave variety enough for play of the cherished hopes and imaginings of men. If we collect any group of barbaric fancies, we find, speaking broadly, that a large proportion have pictured the home of souls as in the west, towards the land of the setting sun. Seen from many a standpoint to sink beneath river, lake, or ocean, which for untutored man enclosed his world, it led to the myth of waters of death dividing earth from heaven, which the soul, often at perilous risk, must cross. Such was the Ginnunga-gap of the Vikings; the nine seas and a half across which travellers to Manala, the under-world of the Finns, must voyage; the great water of the Red Indians; the Vaitarani of the Brahmans; the Stygian stream of the Greeks; and the Jordan of the Christians, that flows between us and the Celestial City, “where the surges cease to roll.” The sinking of the sun below the horizon obviously led to belief in an under-world, whither the ghosts went. Barbaric notions are full of this, and the lower culture out of which their beliefs arose is evidenced in the Orcus of the Romans, the Hades of the Greeks, the Helheim of the Norsemen, the Sheol of the Hebrews, and the Amenti of the Egyptians, the solar features of which last are clearly traceable in their doctrine. Among the Hebrews, Sheol (translated, curiously enough, thirty-one times as “grave,” and thirty-one times as “hell,” in our Authorised Version) was a vast cavernous space in which the shades of good and bad alike wandered—“the small and great are there, and the servant is free from his master.” It is akin in character to the Greek Hades, where they “wander mid shadows and shade, and wail by impassable streams.” As ideas of a Divine rule of the world grew, its manifestations in justice were looked for, and the mystery of iniquity, the wicked “flourishing like a green bay tree,” led to the conception of a future state, in which Lazarus and Dives would change places. Sheol thus became, on the one hand, a land of delight and repose for the faithful, and, on the other hand, one of punishment for the wicked.

Persian, and still older, influences had largely leavened Hebrew conceptions, and local conditions in Judea added pungent elements. The Valley of Hinnom, or Gehenna, “the place where lie the corpses of those who have sinned against Jehovah, where their worm shall not die, neither their fire be quenched;” the dreary volcanic region around the Dead Sea, with its legend of doomed cities, supplied their imagery of hell with its lake of fire and brimstone. And, as the belief travelled westward, it fell into congenial soil. The sulphurous stench around Lacus Avernus, the smoke of Vesuvius, Stromboli, and Etna, wreathed themselves round the hell of Christianity and the under-world of barbaric myth; and from Talmudic writer to classic poet, to Dante and to Milton, the imagination exhausted the material of the horrible to describe the several tortures of the damned. The hell of our northern forefathers remained below the flat earth, but the cold, misty Niflheim melted away before the fiery perdition of Christian dogma. And, in the region bordering thereon, the limbus patrum, the limbus infantum, etc., we have the survival of belief in separate hells characteristic of the Oriental religions, and of the sub-divisions of the lower world in more rudimentary religions.

Beyond the narrow horizon which bounded the world of the ancients, lay the imaginary land of the immortals, the Blessed, the Happy, the Fortunate Isles. But as that horizon enlarged, the Elysian Fields and Banquet Halls were transferred to an upper sphere. In the wonder aroused by the firmament above, with its solid-looking vault across which sun, stars, and clouds traversed; in the place it plays in dreams of barbarian and patriarch, when the sleeper is carried thither; in its brightness of noonday glory as contrasted with the dark sun-set under-world, we may find some of the materials of which the theory of an upper world, a heaven (“the heaved”) is made up. There the barbarian places his paradise to which the rainbow and the Milky Way are roads; there he meets his kindred, and lives where cold, disease, and age are not, but everlasting summer and summer fruits. There, too, for the conceptions of advanced races are drawn from the same sources, the civilised peoples of Europe and America have placed their heaven. And, save in refinement of detail incident to intellectual growth, there is nothing to choose between the earlier and the later; the same gross delights, the same earth-born ideas are there, whether we enter the Norseman’s Valhalla, the Moslem’s Paradise, or the Christian’s New Jerusalem.

§ XII.

CONCLUSIONS FROM THE FOREGOING.

It would exceed the limits and purport of this book to follow the extension of the belief in spirits to its extreme range; in other words, to belief in controlling spirits in inanimate objects, which were advanced pari passu with man’s advancing conceptions to place and rank as the higher gods of polytheism. Such belief, as already indicated, is the outcome of that primitive philosophy which invests the elements above and the earth beneath with departmental deities, until, through successive stages of dualism, the idea of a Supreme Deity is reached, and the approach is thus made towards a conception of the unity and unvarying order of nature. Deferring reference to the part played by dreams as media of communication between heaven and earth, and as warnings of coming events, let us summarise the evidence which has been gathered, and ask whether it warrants the conclusions drawn from it in the present work.

It has been shown that races have existed, and exist still, at so low a level that their scanty stock of words has to be supplemented by gestures, rendering converse in the dark next to impossible. Such people are bewildered by any effort to count beyond their fingers; they have no idea of the relation of things, or of their differences; they have no power of generalisation by which to merge the accidental in the essential. They believe that their names and likenesses are integral parts of themselves, and that they can be bewitched or harmed through them at the hands of any one who knows the one or has obtained the other. As an important result of their confusion between the objective and the subjective, we find a vivid and remarkable belief in the reality of their dreams. The events which make up these are explained only on the theory that if the body did not move from its sleeping place, something related to it did, and that the people, both living and dead, who appeared in dream and vision, did in very presence come. The puzzle is solved by the theory of a second self which can leave the body and return to it. For the savage knows nothing of mind. The belief in this other self is strengthened (possibly more or less created) by its appearance in shadow or reflection, in mocking echo, in various diseases, especially fits, when the sufferer is torn by an indwelling foe, and writhes as if in his merciless grasp. The belief in such a ghost-soul, as to the form and ethereal nature of which all kinds of theories are started, is extended to animals and lifeless things, since like evidence of its existence is supplied by them. The fire that destroys his hut, the wind that blows it down, the lightning that darts from the clouds and strikes his fellow-man dead beside him, the rain-storm that floods his fields, the swollen river that sweeps away his store of food—these and every other force manifest in nature add their weight to the inferences which rude man has drawn. The phenomena which have accounted for the vigour of life and the prostration of disease account for the motion of things in heaven above and the earth beneath, and the barbaric mind thus enlarges its belief in a twofold existence in man to a far-reaching doctrine of spirits everywhere. Step by step, from ghost-soul flitting round the wigwam to the great spirits indwelling in the powers of nature, the belief in supernatural beings with physical qualities arises, until the moral element comes in, and they appear as good and evil gods contending for the mastery of the universe. Passing by details as to the whereabouts of the other self and its doings and destiny in the other world which the dream involves, and following the order of ideas on scientific lines, two queries arise:—

1. Does the evidence before us suffice to warrant the conclusions drawn from it as to the serious and permanent part which dreams have played in the origin and growth of primitive belief in spirits; in short, of belief in supernatural agencies from past to present times? In this place the answer is brief. Of course the antecedent conditions of man’s developed emotional nature, and of the universe of great and small, which is the field of its exercise, are taken for granted.

The general animistic interpretation which man gives to phenomena at the outset expressed itself in the particular conceptions of souls everywhere, of which dreams and such-like things supplied the raw material. If they did not, what did? Denying this, we must fall back on a theory of intuition or on revelation. As to the former, it begs the whole question; as to the latter, can that which is itself the subject of periodical revision be an infallible authority on anything?

If dreams, apparitions, shadows, and the like, are sufficing causes, then, in obedience to the Law of Parsimony (as it is termed in logic), we need not invoke the play of higher causes when lower ones are found competent to account for the effects. If it seems to some that the base is too narrow, the foundation too weak for the superstructure, and that our metaphysics and our beliefs regarding the invisible rest upon something wider and stronger than the illusions of a remote savage ancestry, the facts of man’s history may be adduced as witness to his continuous passage into truth through illusions; to the vast revolutions and readjustments made in his correction of the first impressions of the senses. There is not a belief of the past, from the notions of savages about their dreams and ghost-world to those of more advanced races about their spirit-realms and its occupants, to which this does not apply. In the more delicate observations of the astronomer he must, when estimating the position of any celestial body, take into account its apparent displacement through the refractive properties of the atmosphere, and must also allow for defects of perception in himself due to what is called “personal equation.” And in ascertaining our place in the scale of being, as well as in seeking for the grounds of belief concerning our own nature, we have to take into account the refracting media of dense ignorance and prejudice through which these beliefs have come, and to allow for the confirming error due to personal equation—fond desire. The result will be the vanishing of illusions involving momentous changes in psychology, ethics, and theology. Instead of groping among mental phenomena for explanations of themselves, they will be analysed by the methods already indicated. Instead of resting the authority for moral injunctions on innate ideas of right and wrong, and on inspired statutes and standards, it will rest on the accredited, because verifiable, experience of man. Instead of finding incentives to, or restraints on, conduct by operating on men’s hope of future reward, or fear of hell as “hangman’s whip to keep the wretch in order,” they will be supplied by an ever-widening sense of duty, quickened by love and loyalty to a supreme order, in obedience to which the ultimate happiness of humanity in the life that is will be secured.

In this, and not in theories of an hereafter whose origin and persistence are explained, will man find his satisfaction, and the springs of motive to whatever is ennobling, lovely, and of good report. With the poet, who, laying bare the sources of the unrest of his time, has led us to the secret of its peace, he will ask—

“Is it so small a thing
To have enjoyed the sun,
To have lived light in the spring,
To have loved, to have thought, to have done,
To have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes—
That we should feign a bliss
Of doubtful future date,
And while we dream on this,
Lose all our present state,
And relegate to worlds yet distant our repose?”[94]

2. Does the theory of evolution in its application to the development of the spiritual nature of man, and to the origin and growth of ideas, find any breach of continuity? In its inclusion of him as a part of nature, in accounting for his derivation from pre-human ancestry by a process of natural selection, and in its proofs of his unbroken development from the embryo to adult life, it embraces the growth and development of mind and all that mind connotes. In the words of Professor Huxley, “As there is an anatomy of the body, so there is an anatomy of the mind; the psychologist dissects mental phenomena into elementary states of consciousness, as the anatomist resolves limbs into tissues, and tissues into cells. The one traces the development of complex organs from simple rudiments; the other follows the building up of complex conceptions out of simpler constituents of thought. As the physiologist inquires into the way in which the so-called ‘functions’ of the body are performed, so the psychologist studies the so-called ‘faculties’ of the mind. Even a cursory attention to the ways and works of the lower animals suggests a comparative anatomy and physiology of the mind; and the doctrine of evolution presses for application as much in the one field as in the other.”[95]

Any coherent explanation of the operations of nature was impossible while man had no conception or knowledge of the interplay of its several parts. Now, by the doctrine of continuity, not only are present changes referred to unvarying causes, but the past is interpreted by the processes going on under our eyes. We can as easily calculate eclipses backward as forward; we can learn in present formations of the earth’s crust the history of the deposition of the most ancient strata; we read in a rounded granite pebble the story of epochs, the fire that fused its organic or inorganic particles, the water that rubbed and rolled it; we reconstruct from a few bones the ancestry of obscure forms, and find in the fragments the missing links that connect species now so varied. And the like method is applied to man in his tout ensemble. His development is not arbitrary; what he is is the expansion of germs of what he was.

Till these latter days he has, on the warrant of legends now of worth only as witnesses to his crude ideas, presumed on an isolated place in creation, and excepted his race from an inquiry made concerning every creature beneath him. The pride of birth has hindered his admission of lineal connection between the beliefs of cultured races and the beliefs of savages, and pseudo-scientific writers still confuse issues by assuming distinctions between races to whom spiritual truths have been revealed and races from whom these truths have been withheld. But the only tenable distinction to be drawn nowadays is between the scientific and pre-scientific age in the history of any given race.

In these times, when many run to and fro, and knowledge is increased, we forget how recent are the tremendous changes wrought by the science that—

“Reaches forth her arms
To feel from world to world, and charms
Her secret from the latest moon.”Dulled by familiarity, we forget how operative these changes are upon opinions which have been—save now and again by voices speedily silenced—unquestioned during centuries. It is, in truth, another world to that in which our forefathers lived. Even in science itself the revolution wrought by discoveries within the last fifty years is enormous. Our old standard authorities, especially in astronomy and geology, are now of value only as historical indices to the progress of those sciences, while in the domain of life itself the distinctions between plant and animal, assumed under the terms Botany and Zoology, are effaced and made one under the term Biology. Sir James Paget, in a profoundly interesting address on Science and Theology, has pointed out that it was once thought profane to speak of life as in any kind of relation or alliance with chemical affinities manifest in lifeless matter; now, the correlation of all the forces of matter is a doctrine which investigation more and more confirms. It was believed—many believe it still—that an impassable chasm separates the inorganic from the organic, the latter being attained only through operations of a “vital force” external to matter. That chasm is imaginary. Even the supposed difference between plants and animals in the existence in the latter of a stomach by which to digest and change nutritive substances, vanishes before the experiments on carnivorous plants. And not only do the observations of Mr. Darwin go far to show the existence of a nervous system in plants, but examination of crystals shows that a “truly elemental pathology must be studied in them after mechanical injuries or other disturbing forces.” And is man, “the roof and crown of things,” to witness to diversity amidst this unity?

If we hesitate to believe that our metaphysics have been evolved from savage philosophy, that our accepted opinions concerning man’s nature and destiny are but the improved and purified speculations of the past, we must remember what long years had elapsed before the spirit of science arose and breathed its air of freedom on the human mind. The Christian religion wrought no change in the attitude of man towards the natural world; it remained as full of mystery and miracle to the pagan after his conversion as before it. When that religion was planted in foreign soil it had, as the condition of its thriving, to be nourished by the alien juices. It had to take into itself what it found there, and it found very much in common. Although it displaced and degraded the Dii majores of other faiths, it had its own elaborated order of principalities and powers; it had as real a belief in demons and goblins as any pagan; and it was, therefore, simply a question of baptizing and rechristening the ghost-world of heathendom, substituting angels for swan-maidens and elves, devils for demons, and retaining unchanged the army of evil agencies, who as witches and wraiths swarmed in the night and wrought havoc on soul and body.

The doctrine of continuity admits no exceptions; it has no “favoured nation” clause for man. Its teaching is of order, not confusion; of gradual development, not spasmodic advance; of banishment of all catastrophic theories in the interpretation of the history of man as of nature. In its exposition nothing is “common or unclean;” nothing too trivial for notice in study of the growth of language, of law, of social customs and institutions, of religion, or of aught else comprised in the story of our race. The nursery rhyme and the “wise saw” embody the serious belief of past times; ceremonial rites and priestly vestments preserve the significance and sacredness gathering round the common when it becomes specialised. And in this belief in spiritual powers and agencies within and without, the line uniting the lower and the higher culture is unbroken. Nor can it be otherwise, if it be conceded that the sources of man’s knowledge do not transcend his experience, and that within the limits of this we have to look for the origin of all beliefs, from the crudest animism to the most ennobling conceptions of the Eternal.

“This world is the nurse of all we know,
This world is the mother of all we feel.”

And yet we find this denied by professed scientists, whose minds are built, as it were, in water-tight compartments. The theistic philosopher, trembling at the bogey of human automatism, creates an Ego, “an entity wherein man’s nobility essentially consists, which does not depend for its existence on any play of physical or vital forces, but which makes these forces subservient to its determinations.”[96] The biologist, shrinking from the application of the theory of evolution to the descent of man, argues that “his animality is distinct in nature from his rationality, though inseparably joined during life in one common personality.” His body “was derived from pre-existing materials, and therefore, only derivatively created; that is, by the operation of secondary laws.” His soul, on the other hand, was created in quite a different way, not by any pre-existing means external to God Himself, but by the direct action of the Almighty symbolised by the term “breathing.”[97] As this compound nature of man is defended in a scientific treatise, the question that leaps to the lips is, When did the inoculating action take place?—in the embryonic stage, or at birth, or at the first awakenings of the moral sense?

Readers of that eccentric book, The Unseen Universe, published some eight years ago, may remember that the authors built up a spiritual body whose home lay beyond the visible cosmos.[98] Their argument was to the following effect:—Just as light is held to result from vibrations of the ether set in motion by self-luminous or light-reflecting bodies, so every thought occasions molecular action in the brain, which gives rise to vibrations of the ether. While the effect of a portion of our mental activity is to leave a permanent record on the matter of the brain, and thus constitute an organ of memory, the effect of the remaining portion is to set up thought-waves across the ether, and to construct by these means, in some part of the unseen universe, what may be called our “spiritual body.” By this process there is being gradually built up, as the resultant of our present activities, our future selves; and when we die our consciousness is in some mysterious way transferred to the spiritual body, and thus the continuity of identity is secured.

“Eternal form shall still divide
Th’ eternal soul from all beside.”

We may well quote the ancient words: “If they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry?” The physicists, who thus locate the soul in limitless space, and call it vibrations; the mathematician, who said it must be extension; and the musician, who said, like Aristoxenus, that it was harmony; the Cartesian philosopher, who locates it in the pineal gland; the Costa Rican, who places it in the liver; the Tongans, who make it co-extensive with the body; and the Swedenborgians, who assume an underlying, inner self pervading the whole frame—these have met together, the lower and the higher culture have kissed each other.

The tripartite division of man by the Rabbis, the Platonists, the Paulinists, the Chinese, the mediÆval theories of vegetal, sensitive, and rational souls; what are these but the “other self” of savage philosophy writ large? Plato’s number is found among the Sioux: of their three souls one goes to a cold place, another to a warm place, and the third stays to guard the body. Washington Matthews, in his Ethnology and Philology of the Hidatsa Indians, says:—“It is believed by some of the Hidatsa that every human being has four souls in one. They account for the phenomena of gradual death, when the extremities are apparently dead while consciousness remains, by supposing the four souls to depart, one after another, at different times. When dissolution is complete, they say that all the souls are gone, and have joined together again outside the body. I have heard a Minsutaree quietly discussing this doctrine with an Assinneboine, who believed in only one soul to each body.”

Let it not be thought that because science explains the earth-born origin of some of man’s loftiest hopes, she makes claim to have spoken the last word, and forbids utterance from any other quarter. The theologian is not less free to assume such miraculous intervention in man’s development as marks him nearer to the angel than to the ape, only his assumptions lie beyond the scope of scientific inquiry. And it should be noted that whilst science takes away, she gives with no niggard hand, so that the loss is more seeming than real.

When belief in the earth’s central and supreme place in the universe was surrendered at the bidding of astronomy, there was compensation in the revelation of a universe to which thought can fix no limits. And if man is bidden to surrender belief in his difference in kind from other living creatures, he will be given the conception of a collective humanity whose duties and destiny he shares. That conception will not be the destruction, but the enlargement, of the field of the emotions, and, in contrasting the evanescence of the individual with the permanence of the race, he may find a profounder meaning in the familiar words—

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on,
And our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

§ XIII.

DREAMS AS OMENS AND MEDIA OF COMMUNICATION BETWEEN GODS AND MEN.

Reference has now to be made to the part played by dreams as supposed channels of communication between heaven and earth; as portents, omens, etc. The common belief among the nations of antiquity that they were sent by the gods, and the like belief lurking in the minds of the superstitious to this day, are the scarcely-altered survivals of barbaric confusion respecting them.

When man had advanced from the earlier stages of undefined wonder and bewilderment concerning the powers around and above him to anthropomorphic conceptions of them, i.e. to making them in his own image, the events of his dreams were striking confirmation of his notions about the constant intervention of spiritual beings, gods, chiefs, and ancestors, in the affairs of life. That personal life and will with which the rude intelligence invests the objects of its awe; waving trees, swirling waters, drifting clouds, whirling winds, stately march of sun and star, seemed especially manifest in dreams and visions. In their unrelated and bewildering, or, on the other hand, their surpassingly clear, incidents, the powers indwelling in all things seemed to come nearer than in the less sensational occurrences of the day, uttering their monitions, or making known their will. They were the media by which this and that thing was commanded or forbidden, or by which guidance and counsel and knowledge of the future were given. To induce them, therefore, became a constant effort. The discovery that fasting is a certain method of procuring them is one reason of its prevalence in the lower culture. Amongst all the indigenous races of North America abstinence has been practised as a chief means of securing supernatural inspiration. The Redskin, to become a sorcerer or to secure a revelation from his totem, or the Eskimo, to become Angekok, will endure the most severe privations.

It is believed that whatever is seen in the first dream thus produced by fasting becomes the manitou, or guardian spirit of life, corresponding to the “daimon” of Socrates. And whoever by much fasting is favoured with dreams, and cultivates the art of explaining them as bearing on the future, becomes the feared and consulted “medicine man” of his tribe. His kee-keÉ-wins, or records, are finally shown to the old people, who meet together and consult upon them. They in the end give their approval, and declare that he is gifted as a prophet, is inspired with wisdom, and is fit to lead in the councils of the people.[99]

Very slender data were needed for the conclusions first drawn from dreams; let the death of a friend or foe be the incident, and the event happen; let a hunting-path fill the half-torpid fancy, and a day’s fasting follow; let the mother of a young sportsman dream that she saw a bear in a certain place, and the son, guided by her account, find the bear where indicated, and kill it; the arbitrary relation is set up forthwith. As Lord Bacon says, “Men mark the hits, but not the misses,” and a thousand dreams unfulfilled count as nothing against one dream fulfilled. Out of that is shaped, as dream-lore shows, a canon of interpretation by which whole races will explain their dreams, never staying, when experience happens to confirm it, to wonder that the correspondences are not more frequent than they are. Where the arbitrary act was wrought, the isolated or conflicting influences manifest, there deity or demon was working. So the passage from the crude interpretation of his dreams by the barbarian to the formal elaboration of the dream-oracle is obvious. It was only one of many modes by which the gods were thought to hold converse with man, and by which their will was divined. It was one phase of that many-sided belief in power for good or evil inhering in everything, and which led man to see omens in the common events of life, in births, in the objects any one met in a journey or saw in the sky; to divine the future by numbers, by the lines in the hand, by the song and flight of birds (lurking in the word augury), by the entrails of sacrificed men and animals.[100] Sometimes the god sends the message through a spiritual being, an angel (literally “messenger”); sometimes he, himself, speaks in vision, but more often through the symbolism of both familiar and unfamiliar things. To interpret this is a serious science, and skill and shrewdness applied therein with success were passports to high place and royal favour. In this we have the familiar illustrations of Joseph and Daniel, and, indeed, we need not travel beyond the books of the Old Testament for abundant and varied examples of the importance attached to dreams and visions, and of the place accorded to dreams,[101] an importance undiminished until we come to the literature of the centuries just before Christ. For example, in the Book of Jesus the Son of Sirac, we read—

“Vain and deceitful hopes befit the senseless man,
And dreams make fools rejoice,
Like one who grasps at a shadow and chases the wind,
Is he who puts trust in dreams.”[102]

In the belief that through dreams and oracles Yahweh made known his will, the influence of older beliefs and their literature is apparent. Among the Accadians, a pre-Semitic race in Babylonia, there existed a mass of treatises on magic and divination by dreams and visions, and both from this and from Egyptian sources, blended with survivals from their barbaric past, the Hebrews largely drew.

In this, too, “there is nothing new under the sun.” Homer, painting the vividness and agonising incompleteness of the passing visions, affirms that dreams from Jove proceed, although sometimes to deceive men; Plato assigns prophetic character to the images seen in them; Aristotle sees a divination concerning some things in dreams which is not incredible; the answer to oracles was sought in them, as when the worshipper slept in a temple on the skin of a sacrificed ram, and learned his destiny through the dream that came. The Stoics argued that if the gods love and care for men and are all-knowing, they will tell their purposes to men in sleep. Cicero attaches high importance to the faculty of interpreting them; their phenomena, like those of oracles and predictions, should, he contends, be explained just as the grammarians and the commentators explain the poets.[103]With the influence of these beliefs in the air, and with the legend-visions of Scripture as authority, the divine origin of dreams became a doctrine of the Christian Church. Tertullian says that “we receive dreams from God, there being no man so foolish as never to have known any dreams come true,” and in his De Anima reference is made to a host of writers of dream treatises. For the most part they are but names; their treatises have perished, but enough remains for the perusal of the curious regarding ancient rules of interpretation and the particular significance of certain dreams. The current views of dreams in classic antiquity are believed to be partly embodied in the ’??e??????t??a’ of Artemidorus of Ephesus, who flourished about the middle of the second century, and who reduces dream interpretation to a body of elaborate rules, while amongst Christian writers Synesius of Cyrene, who lived two centuries later, holds a corresponding place.

Both classic and patristic writers supply copious details concerning the classes into which dreams were divided, and which have some curious correspondences among the Oriental nations, as well as in our dream-lore, e.g., when Artemidorus says that he who dreams he hath lost a tooth shall lose a friend, we may compare with this a quotation which Brand gives from the Sapho and Phao of Lily, a playwright of the time of Elizabeth. “Dreams have their trueth. Dreams are but dotings, which come either by things we see in the day or meates that we eat, and so the common-sense preferring it to be the imaginative. ‘I dreamed,’ says Ismena, ‘mine eyetooth was loose, and that I thrust it out with my tongue.’ ‘It foretelleth,’ replies Mileta, ‘the loss of a friend; and I ever thought thee so full of prattle that thou wouldst thrust out the best friend with thy tatling.’”

It is, however, needless to quote from Artemidorus and others of their kin. They do but furnish samples of the ingenuity applied to profitless speculations on matters which were fundamental then, and around which the mind played unchecked and unchallenged. Moreover, the subtle distinctions made between dreams in former times were slowly effaced, or sank to their proper level in the gossip of chap books—our European kee-keÉ-wins. But the belief in the dream as having a serious meaning, and in the spectral appearances in visions as real existences, remained as strong as in any barbarian or pagan. In an atmosphere charged with the supernatural, apparitions and the like were matters of course, the particular form of the illusion to which the senses testified being in harmony with the ideas of the age. The devil does not appear to Greek or Roman, but he sorely troubled the saints, unless their nerves were, like Luther’s, strong enough to overmaster him. Luther speaks of him as coming into his cell, and making a great noise behind the stove, and of his walking in the cloister above his cell at night; “but as I knew it was the devil,” he says, “I paid no attention to him, and went to sleep.” Sceptics now and again arose protesting against the current belief, but they were as a voice crying in the desert. One Henry Cornelius Agrippa, in the fifteenth century, a man born out of due time, says, “To this delusion not a few great philosophers have given not a little credit, especially Democritus, Aristotle, Sincsius, etc., so far building on examples of dreams, which some accident hath made to be true, that thence they endeavour to persuade men that there are no dreams but what are real.”

His words have not yet lost their purport. For the credulity of man, the persistence with which he clings to the shadow of the supernatural after having surrendered the substance, seem almost a constant quantity, varying only in form. Unteachable by experience, fools still pay their guineas to mediums to rap out inane messages from the departed, and send postage stamps to the Astronomer Royal, asking him to “work the planets” for them, and secure them luck in love and law-suits. Nor is there any cure for this but in wise culture of the mind, wise correction, and wholesome control of the emotions. “By faithfully intending the mind to the realities of nature,” as Bacon has it, and by living and working among men in a healthy, sympathetic way, exaggeration of a particular line of thought or feeling is prevented, and the balance of the faculties best preserved. For, adds Dr. Maudsley, in pregnant and well-chosen words, “there are not two worlds—a world of nature and a world of human nature—standing over against one another in a sort of antagonism, but one world of nature, in the orderly evolution of which human nature has its subordinate part. Delusions and hallucinations may be described as discordant notes in the grand harmony. It should, then, be every man’s steadfast aim, as a part of nature—his patient work—to cultivate such entire sincerity of relations with it; so to think, feel, and act always in intimate unison with it; to be so completely one with it in life, that when the summons comes to surrender his mortal part to absorption into it, he does so, not fearfully, as to an enemy who has vanquished him, but trustfully, as to a mother who, when the day’s task is done, bids him lie down to sleep.”

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