It will be shown that men, in their composite and confused notions of the soul, have brought into connexion a list of manifestations of life and thought even more multifarious than this. But also, seeking to avoid such perplexity of combination, they have sometimes endeavoured to define and classify more closely, especially by the theory that man has a combination of several kinds of spirit, soul, or image, to which different functions belong. Already in the barbaric world such classification has been invented or adopted. Thus the Fijians distinguished between a man's 'dark spirit' or shadow, which goes to Hades, and his 'light spirit' or reflexion in water or a mirror, which stays near where he dies.[1] The Malagasy say that the saina or mind vanishes at death, the aina or life becomes mere air, but the matoatoa or ghost hovers round the tomb.[2] In North America, the duality of the soul is a strongly marked Algonquin belief; one soul goes out and sees dreams while the other remains behind; at death one of the two abides with the body, and for this the survivors leave offerings of food, while the other departs to the land of the dead. A division into three souls is also known, and the Dakotas say that man has four souls, one remaining with the corpse, one staying in the village, one going in the air, and one to the land of spirits.[3] The Karens distinguish between the 'là' or 'kelah,' the personal life-phantom, and the 'thah,' the responsible moral soul.[4] More or less under Hindu influence, the Khonds have a fourfold division, as follows: the first soul is that capable of beatification or restoration to Boora the Good Deity; the second is attached to a Khond tribe on earth and is re-born generation after generation, so that at the
- ↑ Williams, 'Fiji,' vol. i. p. 241.
- ↑ Ellis, 'Madagascar,' vol. i. p. 393.
- ↑ Charlevoix, 'Nouvelle France,' vol. vi. pp. 75-8; Schoolcraft, 'Indian Tribes,' part i. pp. 33, 83, part iv. p. 70; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 194; J. G. Müller, pp. 66, 207-8.
- ↑ Cross in 'Journ. Amer. Oriental Soc.' vol. iv. p. 310.
Cic. Verr. v. 45; Wuttke, 'Volksaberglaube,' p. 210; Rochholz, 'Deutscher Glaube,' &c. vol. i. p. 111.
