houses for the New Year's visit;[1] and it seems likely that the special profession of the Roman 'everriatores' who swept the houses out after a funeral, was connected with a similar idea.[2] To this day, it remains a German peasants' saying that it is wrong to slam a door, lest one should pinch a soul in it.[3] The not uncommon practice of strewing ashes to show the footprints of ghosts or demons takes for granted that they are substantial bodies. In the literature of animism, extreme tests of the weight of ghosts are now and then forthcoming. They range from the declaration of a Basuto diviner that the late queen had been bestriding his shoulders, and he never felt such a weight in his life, to Glanvil's story of David Hunter the neatherd, who lifted up the old woman's ghost, and she felt just like a bag of feathers in his arms, or the pathetic German superstition that the dead mother's coming back in the night to suckle the baby she has left on earth, may be known by the hollow pressed down in the bed where she lay, and at last down to the alleged modern spiritualistic reckoning of the weight of a human soul at from 3 to 4 ounces.[4]
Explicit statements as to the substance of soul are to be found both among low and high races, in an instructive series of definitions. The Tongans imagined the human soul to be the finer or more aeriform part of the body, which leaves it suddenly at the moment of death; something comparable to the perfume and essence of a flower as related to the more solid vegetable fibre.[5] The Greenland seers described the soul as they habitually perceived it in their visions; it is pale and soft, they said, and he who tries to seize it feels nothing, for it has no flesh nor bone
- ↑ Meiners, vol. i. p. 318.
- ↑ Festus, s.v. 'everriatores;' see Bastian, l.c., and compare Hartknoch, cited below, vol. ii. p. 40.
- ↑ Wuttke, 'Volksaberglaube,' pp. 132, 216.
- ↑ Casalis, 'Basutos,' p. 285; Glanvil, 'Saducismus Triumphatus,' part ii. p. 161; Wuttke, p. 216; Bastian, 'Psychologie,' p. 192.
- ↑ Mariner, 'Tonga Is.' vol. ii. p. 135.
