after the corpse is carried out, for an obstacle to bar the soul from coming back;[1] so Brandenburg peasants pour out a pail of water at the door after the coffin, to prevent the ghost from walking; and Pomeranian mourners returning from the churchyard leave behind the straw from the hearse that the wandering soul may rest there, and not come back so far as home.[2] In the ancient and mediæval world, men habitually invoked supernatural aid beyond such material shifts as these, calling in the priest to lay or banish intruding ghosts, nor is this branch of the exorcist's art even yet forgotten. There is, and always has been, a prevalent feeling that disembodied souls, especially such as have suffered a violent or untimely death, are baneful and malicious beings. As Meiners suggests in his 'History of Religions,' they were driven unwillingly from their bodies, and have carried into their new existence an angry longing for revenge. No wonder that mankind should so generally agree that if the souls of the dead must linger in the world at all, their fitting abode should be not the haunts of the living but the resting-places of the dead.
After all, it scarcely seems to the lower animistic philosophy that the connexion between body and soul is utterly broken by death. Various wants may keep the soul from its desired rest, and among the chief of these is when its mortal remains have not had the funeral rites. Hence the deep-lying belief that the ghosts of such will walk. Among some Australian tribes the 'ingna,' or evil spirits, human in shape, but with long tails and long upright ears, are mostly souls of departed natives, whose bodies were left to lie unburied or whose death the avenger of blood did not expiate, and thus they have to prowl on the face of the earth, and about the place of death, with no gratification
- ↑ Castrén, 'Finn. Myth.' p. 120.
- ↑ Wuttke, 'Volksaberglaube,' pp. 213-17. Other cases of taking out the dead by a gap made on purpose: Arbousset and Daumas, p. 502 (Bushmen); Magyar, p. 351 (Kimbunda); Moffat, p. 307 (Bechuanas); Waitz, vol. iii. p. 199 (Ojibwas); — their motive is probably that the ghost may not find its way back by the door.
