slain in battle.[1] On the other hand, the thought which shows out in such bold relief in the savage mind, that courage is virtue, and battle and bloodshed the hero's noblest pursuit, leads naturally to a hope of glory for his soul when his body has been slain in fight. Such expectation was not strange in North America, to that Indian tribe, for instance, who talked of the Great Spirit walking in the moonlight on his island in Lake Superior, whither slain warriors will go to him to take their pleasure in the chace.[2] The Nicaraguans declared that men who died in their houses went underground, but the slain in war went to serve the gods in the east, where the sun comes from. This corresponds in part with a remarkable threefold contrast of the future life among their Aztec kinsfolk. Mictlan, the Hades of the general dead, and Tlalocan, the Earthly Paradise, reached by certain special and acute ways of death, have been mentioned here already. But the souls of warriors slain in battle or sacrificed as captives, and of women who died in child-birth, were transported to the heavenly plains; there the heroes, peeping through the holes in their bucklers pierced by arrows in earthly fight, watched the Sun arise and saluted him with shout and clash of arms, and at noon the mothers received him with music and dance to escort him on his western way.[3] In such wise, to the old Norseman, to die the 'straw-death' of sickness or old age was to go down into the dismal loathly house of Hela the Death-goddess; if the warrior's fate on the field of battle were denied him, and death came to fetch him from a peaceful couch, yet at least he could have the scratch of the spear, Odin's mark, and so contrive to go with a blood-stained soul to the glorious Walhalla. Surely then if ever, says a
- ↑ Brebeuf in 'Rel. des Jés.' 1636, p. 104; see also Meiners, vol. ii. p. 769; J. G. Müller, pp. 89, 139.
- ↑ Chateaubriand, 'Voy. en Amériquce' (Religion).
- ↑ Oviedo, 'Nicaragua,' p. 22; Torquemada, 'Monarquia Indiana,' book xiii. c. 48; Sahagun, book iii. app. ch. i.-iii. in Kingsborough, vol. vii. Compare Anderson, 'Exp. to W. Yunnan,' p. 125. (Shans, good men and mothers dying in child-birth to heaven, bad men and those killed by the sword to hell.)
