the cause of the illness. There the dead man is conjured, abused, threatened, until he enters into the Singhilli and discloses what he desires in order to be reconciled. This is the course of procedure when he has been dead for a long time; if he has only recently been buried, the body is dug up, the head cut off and laid open; the moisture which flows from it must be in part consumed in food by the sick person, and of part of it plasters are made which are laid upon him.
“The difficulties are greater when the dead has had no burial, but has been devoured by friend, enemy, or wild beast. The Singhilli then sets about making incantations, and afterwards gives out that the spirit has entered into the body of a monkey, a bird, &c., and manages to effect the capture of the animal or bird. The latter is then killed, and the sick person consumes it, and in consequence of this the spirit loses all right to be anything.”
It is clear from the above that in so far as it is a question of duration, no absolute, free, independent power is conceded to the spirit.
It is as dead that the man is represented in this state of duration, as having had his empirical external existence stripped off him. But his wholly contingent nature still remains to him in this sphere; the objectifying has still reference entirely to the external mode of existence, is still wholly formal. It is not as yet the Essential which is regarded as existent, and what is left behind is still the man’s contingent nature. The duration itself which is given to the dead is a superficial quality; it is not his transfiguration. He continues to be contingent existence, in the power, in the hands of the living self-consciousness, of the magician, so that the latter may even cause him to die over again, and therefore to die a second time.
The idea of immortality hangs together with the idea of God. It always corresponds, in short, with the stage at which the metaphysical conception of God has arrived.
