Naturally, therefore, among cremating peoples, the doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body tended to go out, and what replaced it was the doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul. You may burn the body, but the spirit still survives; and the survival gives origin to a new philosophy of ghosts and revenants, a new idea of the inner nature of ghosthood. Gradually the spirit gets to be conceived as diviner essence, entangled and imprisoned, as it were, in the meshes of the flesh, and only to be set free by means of fire, which thus becomes envisaged at last as friendly rather than destructive in its action on the dead body. What was at first a precaution against the return of the corpse becomes in the end a pious duty; just as burial itself, originally a selfish precaution against the pranks and tricks of returning corpses, becomes in the end so sacred and imperative that unburied ghosts are conceived as wandering about, Archytas-wise, begging for the favour of a handful of sand to prevent them from homeless vagabondage for ever. Nations who burn come to regard the act of burning as the appointed means for freeing the ghost from the confining meshes of the body, and regard it rather as a solemn duty to the dead than as a personal precaution.
Not only so, but there arises among them a vague and fanciful conception of the world of shades very different indeed from the definite and material conception of the two earlier stages. The mummy was looked upon as inhabiting the tomb, which was furnished and decorated for its reception like a house; and it was provided with every needful article for use and comfort. Even the buried body was supplied with tools and implements for the ghost. The necessities of the shade are quite different and more shadowy. He has no need of earthly tools or implements. The objects found in the Long Barrows of the burying folk and the Round Barrows of the cremationists well illustrate this primordial and far-reaching difference. The Long Barrows of the Stone Age people are piled above an interment; they contain a chambered tomb, which is really the subterranean home or palace of the body buried in it. The wives and slaves of the deceased were killed and interred with him to keep him company in his new life in the grave; and implements, weapons, drinking-cups, games, trinkets, and ornaments were buried with their owners. The life in the grave was all as material and real as this one; the same objects that served the warrior in this world would equally serve him in the same form in the next. It is quite different with the Round Barrows of the Bronze Age cremationists. These barrows are piled round an urn., which determines the shape of the tumulus, as the chambered tomb and the corpse determine the shape of the earlier Stone Age interments. They contain ashes alone; and the implements and weapons placed in them are all broken or charred with fire. Why? Because the ghost, immaterial as he has now become, can no longer make use of solid earthly weapons or utensils. It is only their ghosts or shadows that can be of any use to the ghostly possessor in the land of shades. Hence everything he needs is burnt or broken, in order that its ghost may be released and liberated; and all material objects are now conceived as possessing such ghosts, which can be utilised accordingly in the world of spirits.
Note also that with this advance from the surviving or revivable Corpse to the immortal Soul or Spirit, there goes almost naturally and necessarily a correlative advance from continued but solitary life in the tomb to a freer and wider life in an underground world of shades and spirits. The ghost gets greatly liberated and emancipated. He has more freedom of movement, and becomes a citizen of an organised community, often envisaged as ruled over by a King of the Dead, and as divided into places of reward and punishment. But while we modern Europeans pretend to be resurrectionists, it is a fact that our current ghostly and eschatological conceptions (I speak of the world at large, not of mere scholastic theologians) have been largely influenced by ideas derived from this opposite doctrine—a doctrine once held by many or most of our own ancestors, and familiarised to us from childhood in classical literature. In fact, while most Englishmen of the present day believe they believe in the Resurrection of the Body, what they really believe in is the Immortality of the Soul..
It might seem at first sight as though a grave discrepancy existed between the two incongruous ideas, first of burying or burning your dead so that they may not be able to return or to molest you, and second of worshipping at their graves or making offerings to their disembodied spirits. But to the savage mind these two conceptions are by no means irreconcilable. While he jumps upon the corpse of his friend or his father to keep it in the narrow pit he has digged for it, he yet brings it presents of food and drink, or slays animals at the tomb, that the ghost may be refreshed by the blood that trickles down to it. Indeed, several intermediate customs occur, which help us to bridge over the apparent gulf between reverential preservation of the mummified body, and the coarse precautions of burial or burning. Thus, in many cases, some of which we shall examine in the next chapter, after the body has been for some time buried, the head is disinterred, and treasured with care in the family oratory, where it is worshipped and tended, and where it often gives oracles to the members of the household. A ceremonial washing is almost always a feature in this reception of the head; it recurs again and again in various cases, down to the enshrinement of the head of Hoseyn at Cairo, and that of St. Denis at the abbey of the same name, to both of which we shall allude once more at a far later stage of our enquiry. For the present, it must suffice to say that the ceremonial and oracular preservation of the head—the part which sees, and speaks, and eats, and drinks, and listens—is a common feature in all religious usages; that it gives rise apparently to the collections of family skulls which adorn so many savage huts and oratories; that it may be answerable ultimately for the Roman busts and many other imitative images of the dead, in which the head alone is represented; and that when transferred to the sacred human or animal victim (himself, as we shall hereafter see, a slain god), it seems to account for the human heads hung up by the Dyaks and other savages about their houses, as also for the skulls of oxen and other sacred animals habitually displayed on the front of places of worship, whose last relic is the sculptured oxen’s heads which fill the metopes in some Greek and most Roman temples. Much of this, I admit, will be little comprehensible to the reader at the present stage of our argument: but I beg him to bear in mind provisionally this oracular and representative value of the head or skull from this point forth; he will find, as he proceeds, its meaning will become clearer and ever clearer at each successive stage of our exposition.
I ought also to add that between complete preservation of the corpse and the practice of burial there seems to have gone another intermediate stage, now comparatively rare, but once very general, if we may judge from the traces it has left behind it—a stage when all the body or part of it was sacramentally eaten by the survivors as an act of devotion. We will consider this curious and revolting practice more fully when we reach the abstruse problem of sacrifice and sacrament; for the present it will suffice to say that in many instances, in Australia, South America, and elsewhere, the body is eaten, while only the bones are burned or buried. Among these savages, again, it usually happens that the head is cleaned of its flesh by cooking, while the skull is ceremonially washed, and preserved as an object of household veneration and an oracular deity. Instances will be quoted in succeeding chapters.
Thus, between the care taken to prevent returns of the corpse, and the worship paid to the ghost or shade, primitive races feel no such sense of discrepancy or incongruity as would instantly occur to civilised people.
The three stages in human ideas with which this chapter deals may be shortly summed up as corpse-worship, ghost-worship, and shade-worship.
CHAPTER IV.—THE ORIGIN OF GODS.
MR. Herbert Spencer has traced so admirably in his Principles of Sociology the progress of development from the Ghost to the God that I do not propose in this chapter to attempt much more than a brief recapitulation of his main propositions, which, however, I shall supplement with fresh examples, and adapt at the same time to the conception of three successive stages in human ideas about the Life of the Dead, as set forth in the preceding argument. But the hasty resume which I shall give at present will be fleshed