dead man’s use and possession. For the same reason where the
dead are burned, their properties are committed to the flames.
The ghost of the warrior has a ghostly sword and buckler to
fight with and a ghostly cup to drink from, and he is also nourished
by the impalpable odour and reek of the animal victims sacrificed
over his grave. Instead of valuable objects cheap images and
models are often substituted; and why not, if the mere ghosts
of the things are all that the wraith can enjoy? Thus Marco
Polo (ii. 76) describes how in the land of Kinsay (Hang-chau)
“the friends and relations make a great mourning for the
deceased, and clothe themselves in hempen garments, and follow
the corpse, playing on a variety of instruments and singing
hymns to their idols. And when they come to the burning place
they take representations of things cut out of parchment, such
as caparisoned horses, male and female slaves, camels, armour,
suits of cloth of gold (and money), in great quantities, and these
things they put on the fire along with the corpse so that they
are all burned with it. And they tell you that the dead man
shall have all these slaves and animals of which the effigies are
burned, alive in flesh and blood, and the money in gold, at his
disposal in the next world; and that the instruments which
they have caused to be played at his funeral, and the idol hymns
that have been chaunted shall also be produced again to welcome
him in the next world.” The manufacture of such paper simulacra
for consumption at funerals is still an important industry
in Chinese cities. The ancient Egyptians, assured that a man’s
ka or double shall revivify his body, took pains to guard the
flesh from corruption, steeping the corpse in natron and stuffing
it with spices. A body so prepared is called a mummy (q.v.),
and the custom was already of a hoary antiquity in 3200 B.C.,
when the oldest dated mummy we have was made. The bowels,
removed in the process, were placed in jars over the corpse in the
tomb, together with writing tablets, books, musical instruments,
&c., of the dead. Cemeteries also remain full of mummies of
crocodiles, cats, fish, cows and other sacred animals. The
Greeks settled in Egypt learned to mummify their dead, but
the custom was abhorrent to the Jews, although the Christian
belief in the resurrection of the flesh must have been formed to
a large extent under Egyptian influence. Half the superiority of
the Jewish to other ancient religions lay in this, that it prescribed
no funeral rites other than the simplest inhumation.
The dead all over the world and from remote antiquity have been laid not anyhow in the earth, but with the feet and face towards the region in which their future will be spent; the Samoans and Fijians towards the far west whither their souls have preceded them; the Guarayos with head turned eastwards because their god Tamoi has in that quarter “his happy hunting grounds where the dead will meet again” (Tylor, Prim. Cult. ii. 422). The legend is that Christ was buried with His head to the west, and the church follows the custom, more ancient than itself, of laying the dead looking to the East, because that is the attitude of prayer, and because at the last trump they will hurry eastwards. So in Eusebius (Hist. Eccl. 430.19) a martyr explains to his pagan judge that the heavenly Jerusalem, the fatherland of the pious, lay exactly in the east at the rising place of the sun. Where the body is laid out straight it is difficult to discern the presence of any other idea than that it is at rest. In Scandinavian barrows, e.g. in the one opened at Goldhavn in 1830, the skeletons have been found seated on a low stone bench round the wall of the grave chamber facing its opening, which always looks south or east, never north. Here the dead were continuing the drinking bouts they enjoyed on earth
The Peruvians mummified their dead and placed them jointed and huddled up with knees to chin, looking toward the sunset, with the hands held before the face. In the oldest prehistoric tombs along the Nile the bodies are doubled up in the same position. It would seem as if in these and numerous other similar cases the dead were deliberately given in their graves the attitude of a foetus in the womb, and, as Dr Budge remarks (Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life, London, 1899, p. 162), “we may perhaps be justified in seeing in this custom the symbol of a hope that, as the child is born from this position into the world, so might the deceased be born into the life beyond the grave.” The late Quaternary skeletons of the Mentone cave were laid in a layer of ferrugineous earth specially laid down for them, and have contracted a red colour therefrom. Many other prehistoric skeletons found in Italy have a reddish colour, perhaps for the same reason, or because, as often to-day, the bones were stripped of flesh and painted. Ambrose relates that the skeletons of the martyrs Gervasius and Protasius, which he found and deposited A.D. 386 under the altar of his new basilica in Milan, were mirae magnitudinis ut prisca aetas ferebat, and were also coloured red. He imagined the red to be the remains of the martyrs’ blood! Hic sanguis clamat coloris indicio. Salomon Reinach has rightly divined that what Ambrose really hit upon was a prehistoric tomb. Red earth was probably chosen as a medium in which to lay a corpse because demons flee from red. Sacred trees and stones are painted red, and for the most solemn of their rites savages bedaub themselves with red clay. It is a favourite taboo colour.
4. A feast is an essential feature of every primitive funeral, and in the Irish “wake” it still survives. A dead man’s soul or double has to be fed at the tomb itself, perhaps to keep it from prowling about the homes of the survivors in search of victuals; and such food must also be supplied to the dead at stated intervals for months or years. Many races leave a narrow passage or tube open down to the cavity in which the corpse lies, and through it pour down drinks for the dead. Traces of such tubes are visible in the prehistoric tombs of the British Isles. However, such provision of food is not properly a funeral feast unless the survivors participate. In the Eastern churches and in Russia the departed are thus fed on the ninth, twelfth and fortieth days from death. “Ye appease the shades of the dead with wine and meals,” was the charge levelled at the Catholics by the 4th-century Manichaeans, and it has hardly ceased to be true even now after the lapse of sixteen centuries. The funeral feast proper, however, is either a meal of communion with or in the dead, which accompanies interment, or a banquet off the flesh of victims slain in atonement of the dead man’s sins. Some anthropologists see in the common meal held at the grave “the pledge and witness of the unity of the kin, the chief means, if not of making, at least of repairing and renewing it.”[1] The flesh provided at these banquets is occasionally that of the dead man himself; Herodotus and Strabo in antiquity relate this of several half-civilized races in the East and West, and a similar story is told by Marco Polo of certain Tatars. Nor among modern savages are funeral feasts off the flesh of the dead unknown, and they seem to be intended to effect and renew a sacramental union or kinship of the living with the dead. The Uaupes in the Amazons incinerate a corpse a month after death, pound up the ashes, and mix them with their fermented drink. They believe that the virtues of the dead will thus be passed on to his survivors. The life of the tribe is kept inside the tribe and not lost. Such cannibal sacraments, however, are rare, and, except in a very few cases, the evidence for them weak. The slaying and eating of animal victims, however, at the tomb is universal and bears several meanings, separately or all at once. The animals may be slain in order that their ghosts may accompany the deceased in his new life. This significance we have already dwelt upon. Or it is believed that the shade feeds upon them, as the shades came up from Hades and lapped up out of a trench the blood of the animals slain by Ulysses. The survivors by eating the flesh of a victim, whose blood and soul the dead thus consume, sacramentally confirm the mystic tie of blood kinship with the dead. Or lastly, the victim may be offered for the sins of the dead. His sins are even supposed to be transferred into it and eaten by the priest. Such expiatory sacrifices of animals for the dead survive in the Christian churches of Armenia, Syria and of the East generally. Their vicarious character is emphasized in the prayers which accompany them, but the popular understanding of them probably combines all the meanings above enumerated. It has been suggested by Robertson Smith (Religion of the Semites, 336) that the world-wide customs of
- ↑ E. S. Hartland, Legend of Perseus (1895), ii. 278.
