through those places, might take their souls along with him for future service. In perfect consistency with these strong animistic notions, the Peruvians declared that their reason for sacrifice of property to the dead was that they 'have seen, or thought they saw, those who have long been dead walking, adorned with the things that were buried with them, and accompanied by their wives who had been buried alive.'[1]
As definite an implication of the spirit or phantom of an object appears in a recent account from Madagascar, where things are buried to become in some way useful to the dead. When King Radama died, it was reported and firmly believed that his ghost was seen one night in the garden of his country seat, dressed in one of the uniforms which had been buried with him, and riding one of the best horses killed opposite his tomb.[2] Turanian tribes of North Asia avow that the motive of their funeral offerings of horses and sledges, clothes and axes and kettles, flint and steel and tinder, meat and butter, is to provide the dead for his journey to the land of souls, and for his life there.[3] Among the Esths of Northern Europe, the dead starts properly equipped on his ghostly journey with needle and thread, hairbrush and soap, bread and brandy and coin; a toy, if it is a child. And so full a consciousness of practical meaning survived till lately, that now and then a soul would come back at night to reproach its relations with not having provided properly for it, but left it in distress.[4] To turn from these now Europeanized Tatars to a rude race of the Eastern Archipelago, among the Orang Binua of Sambawa there prevails this curious law of inheritance; not only does each surviving relative, father, mother, son, brother, and so forth,
- ↑ Cieza de Leon, p. 161; Rivero and Tschudi, 'Peruvian Antiquities,' pp. 186, 200.
- ↑ Ellis, 'Hist. of Madagascar,' vol. i. pp. 254, 429; see Flacourt, p. 60.
- ↑ Castrén, 'Finn. Myth.' p. 118; J. Billings, Exp. to N. Russia,' p. 129; see 'Samoiedia' in Pinkerton, vol. i. p. 532, and Leems, Lapland;' ibid. p. 484.
- ↑ Boecler, ' Ehsten Gebraüche,' p. 69.
