Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/689

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the Russians, instead of living among their own people under ground. Animals too were all of them to live again (Kamschatka, p. 269-273). The Tartars, when visited by Carpin, had some notion that after death they would enjoy another life where they would perform the same actions as in this (Bergeron, vol. i. art. 3, p. 32). "The most intelligent Greenlanders," writes a traveler among that people, "assert that the soul is a spiritual being quite different from the body and from all matter, that requires no material nourishment, and while the body is decaying in the ground, lives after death and needs a nourishment that is not corporeal, but which they do not know" (H. G., p. 242). The American Indians firmly believed in the immortality of the soul. They thought it would keep the same tendencies after death as the living man had evinced; hence their custom—one that is widely spread—of burying the property of the dead along with the body. The souls were obliged after death to take a long journey, at the end of which they arrived at their appropriate places of suffering and enjoyment. The Paradise of virtuous Indians consisted in the very definite pleasures of good hunting and fishing, eternal spring, abundance of everything with no work, and all the satisfactions of the senses (N. F., tome 3, p. 351-353). The Kafirs, as we have already seen, worship their ancestors, whose "Amadhlozi," or spirits, they believe to continue in existence after death. What they mean by Amadhlozi they explain with tolerable clearness by saying that they are identical with the shadow. These spirits are the true objects of a Kafir's worship, being supposed to possess great power over the affairs of their descendants and relatives for weal or woe. They are believed to reappear in the form of a certain species of harmless snakes, and should a man observe such a snake on the grave of his deceased relation, he will say, "Oh, I have seen him to-day basking on the top of the grave" (R. S. A., pt. 2, p. 142.—K. N., pp. 161,162). Similar reverence for the dead is shown in other parts of Africa. In his lecture on the Ashantees, Mr. Reade says that, "on the death of a member of the household he is sometimes buried under the floor of the hut, in the belief that his spirit may occasionally join in the circle of the living. Food also is placed upon the grave, for they think that as the body of man con-