welfare of their descendants and the members of their elan.”
R. Kleinpaul has written an impressive book in which he makes use of the remnants of the old belief in souls among civilized races to show the relation between the living and the dead.[1] According to him too, this relation culminates in the conviction that the dead, thirsting for blood, draw the living after them. The living did not feel themselves safe from the persecutions of the dead until a body of water had been put between them. That is why it was preferred to bury the dead on islands or to bring them to the other side of a river, the expressions “here” and “beyond” originated in this way. Later moderation has restricted the malevolence of the dead to those categories where a peculiar right to feel rancor had to be admitted, such as the murdered who pursue their murderer as evil spirits, and those who, like brides, had died with their longings unsatisfied. Kleinpaul believes that originally, however, the dead were all vampires, who bore ill-will to the living, and strove to harm them and deprive them of life. It was the corpse that first furnished the conception of an evil spirit.
The hypothesis that those whom we love best
- ↑ R. Kleinpaul: “The Living and the Dead in Folklore, Religion and Myth,” 1898.
