Page:Primitive Culture Vol 2.djvu/33

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RESURRECTION OF BODY.
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resurrection. To the philosophy of the lower races it is by no means necessary that the surviving soul should be provided with a new body, for it seems itself to be of a filmy or vaporous corporeal nature, capable of carrying on an independent existence like other corporeal creatures. Savage descriptions of the next world are often such absolute copies of this, that it is scarcely possible to say whether the dead are or are not thought of as having bodies like the living ; and a few pieces of evidence of this class are hardly enough to prove the lower races to hold original and distinct doctrines of corporeal resurrection.[1] Again, attention must be given to the practice, so common among low and high races, of preserving relics of the dead, from mere morsels of bone up to whole mummified bodies. It is well known that the departed soul is often thought apt to revisit the remains of the body, as is seen in the well-known pictures of the Egyptian funeral ritual. But the preservation of these remains, even where it thus involves a permanent connexion between body and soul, does not necessarily approach more closely to a bodily resurrection.[2] In discussing the closely allied doctrine of metempsychosis, I have described the theory of the soul's transmigration into a new human body as asserting in fact an earthly resurrection. From the same point of view, a bodily resurrection in Heaven or Hades is technically a transmigration of the soul. This is plain among the higher races, in whose religion these doctrines take at once clearer definition and more practical import. There are some distinct mentions of bodily resurrection in the Rig Veda: the dead is spoken of as glorified, putting on his body (tanu); and it is even promised that the pious man shall be born in the next world with his entire body (sarvatanû). In Brah-

  1. See J. G. Müller, 'Amer. Urrel.' p. 208 (Caribs); but compare Rochefort, p. 429. Steller, 'Kamtschatka,' p. 269; Castrén, 'Finnische Mythologie,' p. 119.
  2. For Egyptian evidence see the funeral papyri and translations of the 'Book of the Dead.' Compare Brinton, 'Myths of New World,' p. 254, &c.