The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3)

S >> Sir James George Frazer >> The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3)

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49

[Sidenote: Sometimes the custom is observed when the original motive for
it is forgotten.]

Sometimes, while the custom continues to be practised, the idea which
gave rise to it has either become obscured or has been incorrectly
reported. Thus we are told that when a death has taken place among the
Indians of North-west America "the body is at once taken out of the
house through an opening in the wall from which the boards have been
removed. It is believed that his ghost would kill every one if the body
were to stay in the house."[765] Such a belief, while it would furnish
an excellent reason for hurrying the corpse out of the house as soon as
possible, does not explain why it should be carried out through a
special opening instead of through the door. Again, when a Queen of Bali
died, "the body was drawn out of a large aperture made in the wall to
the right-hand side of the door, in the absurd opinion of _cheating the
devil_, whom these islanders believe to lie in wait in the ordinary
passage."[766] Again, in Mukden, the capital of Manchuria, the corpses
of children "must not be carried out of a door or window, but through a
new or disused opening, in order that the evil spirit which causes the
disease may not enter. The belief is that the Heavenly Dog which eats
the sun at an eclipse demands the bodies of children, and that if they
are denied to him he will bring certain calamity on the household."[767]
These explanations of the custom are probably misinterpretations adopted
at a later time when its original meaning was forgotten. For a custom
often outlives the memory of the motives which gave it birth. And as
royalty is very conservative of ancient usages, it would be no matter
for surprise if the corpses of kings should continue to be carried out
through special openings long after the bodies of commoners were allowed
to be conveyed in commonplace fashion through the ordinary door. In
point of fact we find the old custom observed by kings in countries
where it has apparently ceased to be observed by their subjects. Thus
among the Sakalava and Antimerina of Madagascar, "when a sovereign or a
prince of the royal family dies within the enclosure of the king's
palace, the corpse must be carried out of the palace, not by the door,
but by a breach made for the purpose in the wall; the new sovereign
could not pass through the door that had been polluted by the passage of
a dead body."[768] Similarly among the Macassars and Buginese of
Southern Celebes there is in the king's palace a window reaching to the
floor through which on his decease the king's body is carried out.[769]
That such a custom is only a limitation to kings of a rule which once
applied to everybody becomes all the more probable, when we learn that
in the island of Saleijer, which lies to the south of Celebes, each
house has, besides its ordinary windows, a large window in the form of a
door, through which, and not through the ordinary entrance, every corpse
is regularly removed at death.[770]

[Sidenote: Another Fijian funeral custom.]

To return from this digression to Fiji, we may conclude with a fair
degree of probability that when the side of a Fijian king's house was
broken down to allow his corpse to be carried out, though there were
doors at hand wide enough for the purpose, the original intention was to
prevent the return of his ghost, who might have proved a very unwelcome
intruder to his successor on the throne. But I cannot offer any
explanation of another Fijian funeral custom. You may remember that in
Fiji it was customary after the death of a chief to circumcise such lads
as had reached a suitable age.[771] Well, on the fifth day after a
chief's death a hole used to be dug under the floor of a temple and one
of the newly circumcised lads was secreted in it. Then his companions
fastened the doors of the temple securely and ran away. When the lad
hidden in the hole blew on a shell-trumpet, the friends of the deceased
chief surrounded the temple and thrust their spears at him through the
fence.[772] What the exact significance of this curious rite may have
been, I cannot even conjecture; but we may assume that it had something
to do with the state of the late chief's soul, which was probably
supposed to be lingering in the neighbourhood.

[Sidenote: Fijian notions concerning the other world and the way
thither. The River of the Souls.]

It remains to say a little as to the notions which the Fijians
entertained of the other world and the way thither. After death the
souls of the departed were believed to set out for Bulu or Bulotu, there
to dwell with the great serpent-shaped god Ndengei. His abode seems to
have been generally placed in the Nakauvandra mountains, towards the
western end of Viti Levu, the largest of the Fijian Islands. But on this
subject the ideas of the people were, as might be expected, both vague
and inconsistent. Each tribe filled in the details of the mythical land
and the mythical journey to suit its own geographical position. The
souls had generally to cross water, either the sea or a river, and they
were put across it by a ghostly ferryman, who treated the passengers
with scant courtesy.[773] According to some people, the River of the
Souls (_Waini-yalo_) is what mortals now call the Ndravo River. When the
ghosts arrived on the bank, they hailed the ferryman and he paddled his
canoe over to receive them. But before he would take them on board they
had to state whether they proposed to ship as steerage or as cabin
passengers, and he gave them their berths accordingly; for there was no
mixing up of the classes in the ferry-boat; the ghosts of chiefs kept
strictly to themselves at one end of the canoe, and the ghosts of
commoners huddled together at the other end.[774] The natives of
Kandavu, in Southern Fiji, say that on clear days they often see Bulotu,
the spirit land, lying away across the sea with the sun shining sweetly
on it; but they have long ago given up all hope of making their way to
that happy land.[775] They seem to say with the Demon Lover,

"O yonder are the hills of heaven
Where you will never win."

[Sidenote: The place of embarcation for the ghosts.]

Though every island and almost every town had its own portal through
which the spirits passed on their long journey to the far country, yet
there was one called Nai Thombothombo, which appears to have been more
popular and frequented than any of the others as a place of embarcation
for ghosts. It is at the northern point of Mbua Bay, and the ghosts shew
their good taste in choosing it as their port to sail from, for really
it is a beautiful spot. The foreland juts out between two bays. A
shelving beach slopes up to precipitous cliffs, their rocky face mantled
with a thick green veil of creepers. Further inland the shade of tall
forest trees and the softened gloom cast by crags and rocks lend to the
scene an air of solemnity and hallowed repose well fitted to impress the
susceptible native mind with an awful sense of the invisible beings that
haunt these sacred groves. Natives have been known to come on pilgrimage
to the spot expecting to meet ghosts and gods face to face.[776]

[Sidenote: The ghost and the pandanus tree.]

Many are the perils and dangers that beset the Path of the Souls (_Sala
Ni Yalo_). Of these one of the most celebrated is a certain pandanus
tree, at which every ghost must throw the ghost of the real whale's
tooth which was placed for the purpose in his hand at burial. If he hits
the tree, it is well for him; for it shews that his friends at home are
strangling his wives, and accordingly he sits down contentedly to wait
for the ghosts of his helpmeets, who will soon come hurrying to him. But
if he makes a bad shot and misses the tree, the poor ghost is very
disconsolate, for he knows that his wives are not being strangled, and
who then will cook for him in the spirit land? It is a bitter thought,
and he reflects with sorrow and anger on the ingratitude of men and
especially of women. His reflections, as reported by the best authority,
run thus: "How is this? For a long time I planted food for my wife, and
it was also of great use to her friends: why then is she not allowed to
follow me? Do my friends love me no better than this, after so many
years of toil? Will no one, in love to me, strangle my wife?"[777]

[Sidenote: Hard fate of unmarried ghosts.]

But if the lot of a married ghost, whose wives have not been murdered,
is hard, it is nevertheless felicity itself compared to the fate of
bachelor ghosts. In the first place there is a terrible being called the
Great Woman, who lurks in a shady defile, ready to pounce out on him;
and if he escapes her clutches it is only to fall in with a much worse
monster, of the name of Nangganangga, from whom there is, humanly
speaking, no escape. This ferocious goblin lays himself out to catch the
souls of bachelors, and so vigilant and alert is he that not a single
unmarried Fijian ghost is known to have ever reached the mansions of the
blest. He sits beside a big black stone at high-water mark waiting for
his prey. The bachelor ghosts are aware that it would be useless to
attempt to march past him when the tide is in; so they wait till it is
low water and then try to sneak past him on the wet sand left by the
retiring billows. Vain hope! Nangganangga, sitting by the stone, only
smiles grimly and asks, with withering sarcasm, whether they imagine
that the tide will never flow again? It does so only too soon for the
poor ghosts, driving them with every breaking wave nearer and nearer to
their implacable enemy, till the water laps on the fatal stone, and then
he grips the shivering souls and dashes them to pieces on the big black
block.[778]

[Sidenote: The Killer of Souls.]

Again, there is a very terrible giant armed with a great axe, who lies
in wait for all and sundry. He makes no nice distinction between the
married and the unmarried, but strikes out at all ghosts
indiscriminately. Those whom he wounds dare not present themselves in
their damaged state to the great God Ndengei; so they never reach the
happy fields, but are doomed to roam the rugged mountains disconsolate.
However, many ghosts contrive to slip past him unscathed. It is said
that after the introduction of fire-arms into the islands the ghost of a
certain chief made very good use of a musket which had been
providentially buried with his body. When the giant drew near and was
about to lunge out with the axe in his usual style, the ghost discharged
the blunderbuss in his face, and while the giant was fully engaged in
dodging the hail of bullets, the chief rushed past him and now enjoys
celestial happiness.[779] Some lay the scene of this encounter a little
beyond the town of Nambanaggatai; for it is to be remembered that many
of the places in the Path of the Souls were identified with real places
in the Fijian Islands. And the name of the giant is Samu-yalo, that is,
the Killer of Souls. He artfully conceals himself in some mangrove
bushes just beyond the town, from which he rushes out in the nick of
time to fell the passing ghosts. Whenever he kills a ghost, he cooks and
eats him and that is the end of the poor ghost. It is the second death.
The highway to the Elysian fields runs, or used to run, right through
the town of Nambanaggatai; so all the doorways of the houses were placed
opposite each other to allow free and uninterrupted passage to the
invisible travellers. And the inhabitants spoke to each other in low
tones and communicated at a little distance by signs. The screech of a
paroquet in the woods was the signal of the approach of a ghost or
ghosts; the number of screeches was proportioned to the number of the
ghosts,--one screech, one ghost, and so on.[780]

[Sidenote: A trap for unwary ghosts.]

Souls who escape the Killer of Souls pass on till they come to
Naindelinde, one of the highest peaks of the Kauvandra mountains. Here
the path ends abruptly on the brink of a precipice, the foot of which is
washed by a deep lake. Over the edge of the precipice projects a large
steer-oar, and the handle is held either by the great god Ndengei
himself or, according to the better opinion, by his deputy. When a ghost
comes up and peers ruefully over the precipice, the deputy accosts him.
"Under what circumstances," he asks, "do you come to us? How did you
conduct yourself in the other world?" Should the ghost be a man of rank,
he may say, "I am a great chief. I lived as a chief, and my conduct was
that of a chief. I had great wealth, many wives, and ruled over a
powerful people. I have destroyed many towns, and slain many in war."
"Good, good," says the deputy, "just sit down on the blade of that oar,
and refresh yourself in the cool breeze." If the ghost is unwary enough
to accept the invitation, he has no sooner seated himself on the blade
of the oar with his legs dangling over the abyss, than the deputy-deity
tilts up the other end of the oar and precipitates him into the deep
water, far far below. A loud smack is heard as the ghost collides with
the water, there is a splash, a gurgle, a ripple, and all is over. The
ghost has gone to his account in Murimuria, a very second-rate sort of
heaven, if it is nothing worse. But a ghost who is in favour with the
great god Ndengei is warned by him not to sit down on the blade of the
oar but on the handle. The ghost takes the hint and seats himself firmly
on the safe end of the oar; and when the deputy-deity tries to heave it
up, he cannot, for he has no purchase. So the ghost remains master of
the situation, and after an interval for refreshment is sent back to
earth to be deified.[781]

[Sidenote: Murimuria, an inferior sort of heaven. The Fijian Elysium.]

In Murimuria, which, as I said, is an inferior sort of heaven, the
departed souls by no means lead a life of pure and unmixed enjoyment.
Some of them are punished for the sins they committed in the flesh. But
the Fijian notion of sin differs widely from ours. Thus we saw that the
ghosts of men who did no murder in their lives were punished for their
negligence by having to pound muck with clubs. Again, people who had not
their ears bored on earth are forced in Hades to go about for ever
bearing on their shoulders one of the logs of wood on which bark-cloth
is beaten out with mallets, and all who see the sinner bending under the
load jeer at him. Again, women who were not tattooed in their life are
chased by the female ghosts, who scratch and cut and tear them with
sharp shells, giving them no respite; or they scrape the flesh from
their bones and bake it into bread for the gods. And ghosts who have
done anything to displease the gods are laid flat on their faces in rows
and converted into taro beds. But the few who do find their way into the
Fijian Elysium are blest indeed. There the sky is always cloudless; the
groves are perfumed with delicious scents; the open glades in the forest
are pleasant; there is abundance of all that heart can desire. Language
fails to describe the ineffable bliss of the happy land. There the souls
of the truly good, who have murdered many of their fellows on earth and
fed on their roasted bodies, are lapped in joy for ever.[782]

[Sidenote: Fijian doctrine of transmigration.]

Nevertheless the souls of the dead were not universally believed to
depart by the Spirit Path to the other world or to stay there for ever.
To a certain extent the doctrines of transmigration found favour with
the Fijians. Some of them held that the spirits of the dead wandered
about the villages in various shapes and could make themselves visible
or invisible at pleasure. The places which these vagrant souls loved to
haunt were known to the people, who in passing by them were wont to make
propitiatory offerings of food or cloth. For that reason, too, they were
very loth to go abroad on a dark night lest they should come bolt upon a
ghost. Further, it was generally believed that the soul of a celebrated
chief might after death enter into some young man of the tribe and
animate him to deeds of valour. Persons so distinguished were pointed
out and regarded as highly favoured; great respect was paid to them,
they enjoyed many personal privileges, and their opinions were treated
with much consideration.[783]

[Sidenote: Few souls saved under the old Fijian dispensation.]

On the whole, when we survey the many perils which beset the way to the
Fijian heaven, and the many risks which the souls of the dead ran of
dying the second death in the other world or of being knocked on the
head by the living in this, we shall probably agree with the missionary
Mr. Williams in concluding that under the old Fijian dispensation there
were few indeed that were saved. "Few, comparatively," he says, "are
left to inhabit the regions of Mbulu, and the immortality even of these
is sometimes disputed. The belief in a future state is universal in
Fiji; but their superstitious notions often border upon transmigration,
and sometimes teach an eventual annihilation."[784]

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Concluding observations.]

Here I must break off my survey of the natural belief in immortality
among mankind. At the outset I had expected to carry the survey further,
but I have already exceeded the usual limits of these lectures and I
must not trespass further on your patience. Yet the enquiry which I have
opened seems worthy to be pursued, and if circumstances should admit of
it, I shall hope at some future time to resume the broken thread of
these researches and to follow it a little further through the labyrinth
of human history. Be that as it may, I will now conclude with a few
general observations suggested by the facts which I have laid before
you.

[Sidenote: Strength and universality of the natural belief in
immortality among savages. Wars between savage tribes spring in large
measure from their belief in immortality. Economic loss involved in
sacrifices to the dead.]

In the first place, then, it is impossible not to be struck by the
strength, and perhaps we may say the universality, of the natural belief
in immortality among the savage races of mankind. With them a life after
death is not a matter of speculation and conjecture, of hope and fear;
it is a practical certainty which the individual as little dreams of
doubting as he doubts the reality of his conscious existence. He assumes
it without enquiry and acts upon it without hesitation, as if it were
one of the best-ascertained truths within the limits of human
experience. The belief influences his attitude towards the higher
powers, the conduct of his daily life, and his behaviour towards his
fellows; more than that, it regulates to a great extent the relations of
independent communities to each other. For the state of war, which
normally exists between many, if not most, neighbouring savage tribes,
springs in large measure directly from their belief in immortality;
since one of the commonest motives for hostility is a desire to appease
the angry ghosts of friends, who are supposed to have perished by the
baleful arts of sorcerers in another tribe, and who, if vengeance is not
inflicted on their real or imaginary murderers, will wreak their fury on
their undutiful fellow-tribesmen. Thus the belief in immortality has not
merely coloured the outlook of the individual upon the world; it has
deeply affected the social and political relations of humanity in all
ages; for the religious wars and persecutions, which distracted and
devastated Europe for ages, were only the civilised equivalents of the
battles and murders which the fear of ghosts has instigated amongst
almost all races of savages of whom we possess a record. Regarded from
this point of view, the faith in a life hereafter has been sown like
dragons' teeth on the earth and has brought forth crop after crop of
armed men, who have turned their swords against each other. And when we
consider further the gratuitous and wasteful destruction of property as
well as of life which is involved in sacrifices to the dead, we must
admit that with all its advantages the belief in immortality has
entailed heavy economical losses upon the races--and they are
practically all the races of the world--who have indulged in this
expensive luxury. It is not for me to estimate the extent and gravity of
the consequences, moral, social, political, and economic, which flow
directly from the belief in immortality. I can only point to some of
them and commend them to the serious attention of historians and
economists, as well as of moralists and theologians.

[Sidenote: How does the savage belief in immortality bear on the
question of the truth or falsehood of that belief in general? The answer
depends to some extent on the view we take of human nature. The view of
the grandeur and dignity of man.]

My second observation concerns, not the practical consequences of the
belief in immortality, but the question of its truth or falsehood. That,
I need hardly say, is an even more difficult problem than the other, and
as I intimated at the outset of the lectures I find myself wholly
incompetent to solve it. Accordingly I have confined myself to the
comparatively easy task of describing some of the forms of the belief
and some of the customs to which it has given rise, without presuming to
pass judgment upon them. I must leave it to others to place my
collections of facts in the scales and to say whether they incline the
balance for or against the truth of this momentous belief, which has
been so potent for good or ill in history. In every enquiry much depends
upon the point of view from which the enquirer approaches his subject;
he will see it in different proportions and in different lights
according to the angle and the distance from which he regards it. The
subject under discussion in the present case is human nature itself; and
as we all know, men have formed very different estimates of themselves
and their species. On the one hand, there are those who love to dwell on
the grandeur and dignity of man, and who swell with pride at the
contemplation of the triumphs which his genius has achieved in the
visionary world of imagination as well as in the realm of nature.
Surely, they say, such a glorious creature was not born for mortality,
to be snuffed out like a candle, to fade like a flower, to pass away
like a breath. Is all that penetrating intellect, that creative fancy,
that vaulting ambition, those noble passions, those far-reaching hopes,
to come to nothing, to shrivel up into a pinch of dust? It is not so, it
cannot be. Man is the flower of this wide world, the lord of creation,
the crown and consummation of all things, and it is to wrong him and his
creator to imagine that the grave is the end of all. To those who take
this lofty view of human nature it is easy and obvious to find in the
similar beliefs of savages a welcome confirmation of their own cherished
faith, and to insist that a conviction so widely spread and so firmly
held must be based on some principle, call it instinct or intuition or
what you will, which is deeper than logic and cannot be confuted by
reasoning.

[Sidenote: The view of the pettiness and insignificance of man.]

On the other hand, there are those who take a different view of human
nature, and who find in its contemplation a source of humility rather
than of pride. They remind us how weak, how ignorant, how short-lived is
the individual, how infirm of purpose, how purblind of vision, how
subject to pain and suffering, to diseases that torture the body and
wreck the mind. They say that if the few short years of his life are not
wasted in idleness and vice, they are spent for the most part in a
perpetually recurring round of trivialities, in the satisfaction of
merely animal wants, in eating, drinking, and slumber. When they survey
the history of mankind as a whole, they find the record chequered and
stained by folly and crime, by broken faith, insensate ambition, wanton
aggression, injustice, cruelty, and lust, and seldom illumined by the
mild radiance of wisdom and virtue. And when they turn their eyes from
man himself to the place he occupies in the universe, how are they
overwhelmed by a sense of his littleness and insignificance! They see
the earth which he inhabits dwindle to a speck in the unimaginable
infinities of space, and the brief span of his existence shrink into a
moment in the inconceivable infinities of time. And they ask, Shall a
creature so puny and frail claim to live for ever, to outlast not only
the present starry system but every other that, when earth and sun and
stars have crumbled into dust, shall be built upon their ruins in the
long long hereafter? It is not so, it cannot be. The claim is nothing
but the outcome of exaggerated self-esteem, of inflated vanity; it is
the claim of a moth, shrivelled in the flame of a candle, to outlive the
sun, the claim of a worm to survive the destruction of this terrestrial
globe in which it burrows. Those who take this view of the pettiness and
transitoriness of man compared with the vastness and permanence of the
universe find little in the beliefs of savages to alter their opinion.
They see in savage conceptions of the soul and its destiny nothing but a
product of childish ignorance, the hallucinations of hysteria, the
ravings of insanity, or the concoctions of deliberate fraud and
imposture. They dismiss the whole of them as a pack of superstitions and
lies, unworthy the serious attention of a rational mind; and they say
that if such drivellings do not refute the belief in immortality, as
indeed from the nature of things they cannot do, they are at least
fitted to invest its high-flown pretensions with an air of ludicrous
absurdity.