These "English answers to a Roman question," however, are merely deductions. In support of a general theory, Sir James Frazer has gathered together a great number of burial customs, and claims that, even when at the time of observation their implication is avowedly that of pollution and purification, such motives are not original; but the stunted survival of animistic beliefs, involving universal fear of the ghost. Thus he says that when mourners among the Siberians, Chinese, or ancient Romans have stepped across a fire ostensibly for purposes of purification on the return from a funeral, this particular rite may have been practised long after the original intention was lost.[1] He concludes: "Wherever we find a so-called purification by fire and water from pollution contracted by contact with the dead, we may conclude that the original intention was to place a physical barrier of fire and water between the living and the dead, and that the conception of pollution and purification are merely the fiction of a later age to explain ceremonies of which the original meaning was forgotten."[2]
Such a doctrine is liable to criticism in at least two ways. In the first place, the view may be challenged that in primitive thought the dead are universally feared and hated. In the second place, we may enquire whether the evidence at our disposal goes to show that the conception of purification and pollution are late and wholly secondary to the clearly conceived ideas of barrier and ghost.
As for fear of the ghost, the mass of evidence in the article before us is not more convincing than that adduced by Dr. Jevons to prove the contrary case.[3] For him the leading motive in burial customs is not fear; but the love
- ↑ Frazer, "On Certain Burial Customs," J.A.I. 1885, p. 76.
- ↑ Frazer, ib. p. 80.
- ↑ F. B. Jevons, Introduction to the History of Religion, London, 1896, p. 46 sqq.
would seem to be to preserve the threshold from the contamination of birth; not to indicate a general belief in the malignity of babies.
