Page:A book of folk-lore (1913).djvu/187

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184
A BOOK OF FOLK-LORE

opposite sentiments give rise to most complicated practices and conceptions, which are frequently in flagrant contradiction with one another.

Be that as it may. I think that what we shall see in Europe of inconsistencies is due to there having been in it the Aryan race, which placed little value on the body, but esteemed the soul as the essential quality of personality; and on the other hand, the Rude-Stone-Monument Builders, who had no conception of the soul as apart from the body, and whose religion consisted not in animism at all, but in ancestor worship, this is to say, of the ancestor buried in his cairn or dolmen.

We know that periodically a family or tribe opened the ancestral tomb and scraped and cleaned the bodies of their forebears. We know this, because we can trace the scratches made on their bones with flint scrapers, as also, because not having a perfect knowledge of anatomy, they sometimes replaced the bones wrongly, as the tibia of the right leg placed on the left side. We know also, from actual finds, that a loving widow would occasionally secure the skull of the late lamented and suspend it round her neck; or if not the entire skull, yet a portion of it,