Umbra cruenta Remi visa est assistere lecto.
Again, some modes of death are supposed to kill not only the body but also the soul. ‘Among all primitive peoples,’ writes Mr. Dorman,45 ‘where a belief in the renewal of life, or the resurrection, exists, the peace and happiness of the spirit, which remains in or about the body, depend upon success in preventing the body, or any part of it, from being devoured or destroyed in any manner.’ The New Zealanders believed that the man who was eaten was annihilated, both body and soul; and one day a bushman, who was a magician, having put to death a woman, dashed the head of the corpse to pieces with large stones, buried her, and made a large fire over the grave, for fear, as he explained, lest she should rise again and trouble him. The same idea, remarks Sir John Lubbock,46 evidently influenced the Californian, who did not dispute the immortality of the whites, who buried their dead, but could not believe the same of his own people, because they were in the habit of burning them, maintaining that when they were burnt they became annihilated.
It may be added, too, that the belief underlying the burial customs of most American tribes was to preserve the bones of the dead, the opinion being that the soul, or a part of it, dwelt in the bones. These, indeed, were the seeds which, planted in the earth, or preserved unbroken in safe places, would in time put on once again a garb of flesh, and germinate into living human beings.47 This Animistic belief has been amply illustrated by mythology and superstition. In an Aztec legend, after one of the destructions of the world, Zoloti descended to the realm of the dead, and brought thence a bone of the perished race. This, sprinkled with blood, grew on the fourth day into a youth, the father of the present race. The practice of pulverising the bones of the dead, practised by some tribes, and of mixing them with the food, was defended by asserting that the souls of the dead remained in the bones, and lived again in the living.48 The Peruvians were so careful lest any of the body should be lost, that they preserved even the parings of the nails and clippings of the hair – expecting the mummified body to be inhabited by its soul; while the Choctaws maintain that the spirits of the dead will return to the bones in the bone mounds, and flesh will knit together their loose joints. Even the lower animals were supposed to follow the same law. ‘Hardly any of the American hunting-tribes,’ writes Mr. Brinton, ‘before their original manners were vitiated by foreign influence, permitted the bones of game slain in the chase to be broken, or left carelessly about the encampment; they were collected in heaps, or thrown into the water.’ The Yuricares of Bolivia carried this belief to such an inconvenient extent that they carefully put by even small fish bones, saying that unless this was done the fish and game would disappear from the country. The traveller on the western prairies often notices the buffalo skulls, countless numbers of which bleach on those vast plains, arranged in circles and symmetrical piles by the careful hands of the native hunters. The explanation for this practice is that these osseous relics of the dead ‘contain the spirits of the slain animals, and that some time in the future they will rise from the earth, re-clothe themselves with flesh, and stock the prairies anew.’
As a curious illustration of how every spiritual conception was materialised in olden times, may be quoted the fanciful conception of the weight of the soul. Thus in mediæval literature the angel in the Last Judgment ‘was constantly represented weighing the souls in a literal balance, while devils clinging to the scales endeavoured to disturb the equilibrium.’49 But how seriously such tests of the weight of the soul have been received, may be gathered from the cases now and then forthcoming of this materialistic notion of its nature. These, writes Dr. Tylor,50 range from the ‘conception of a Basuto diviner that the late queen had been bestriding his shoulders, and he never felt such a weight in his wife, to Glanvil’s story of David Hunter, the neatherd, who lifted up the old woman’s ghost, and she felt just like a bag of feathers in his arms; or the pathetic superstition that the dead mother’s coming back in the night to suckle the baby she has left on earth, may be known by the hollow pressed down in the bed where she lay, and at last down to the alleged modern spiritualistic reckoning of the weight of a human soul at from three to four ounces.’ But the heavy tread which occasionally makes the stairs creak and boards resound has been instanced as showing that, whatever may be the real nature of the soul, it is capable of materialising itself at certain times, and of displaying an amount of force and energy in no way dissimilar to that which is possessed when living in the flesh.
Just, too, as souls are possessed of visible forms, so they are generally supposed to have voices. According to Dr. Tylor,51 ‘men who perceive evidently that souls do talk when they present themselves in dream or vision, naturally take for granted at once the objective reality of the ghostly voice, and of the ghostly form from which it proceeds;’ and this principle, he adds, ‘is involved in the series of narratives of spiritual communications with living men, from savagery onward to civilisation.’ European folk-lore represents ghostly voices as resembling their material form during life, although less audible. With savage races the spirit voice is described ‘as a low murmur, chirp, or whistle.’ Thus, when the ghosts of the New Zealanders address the living, they speak in whistling tones. The sorcerer among the Zulus ‘hears the spirits who speak by whistlings speaking to him.’ Whistling is the language of the Caledonians, and the Algonquin Indians of North America ‘could hear the shadow souls of the dead chirp like crickets.’ As far back as the time of Homer, the ghosts make a similar sound, ‘and even as bats flit gibbering in the secret place of a wonderful cavern, even so the souls gibbered as they fared together.’52
Ghosts, when they make their appearance, are generally supposed, as already noticed, to have a perfect resemblance, in every respect, to the deceased person. Their faces appear the same – except that they are usually paler than when alive – and the ordinary expression is described by writers on the subject as ‘more in sorrow than in anger.’ Thus, when the ghost of Banquo rises and takes a seat at the table, Macbeth says to the apparition —
Never shake
Thy gory locks at me.
And Horatio tells Marcellus how the ghost of Hamlet’s father was not only fully armed, but —
So frown’d he once, when in angry parle,
He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice.
The folk-lore stories from most parts of the world coincide in this idea. It was recorded of the Indians