The fear of the dead has also taught men to abstain from robbing or violating their tombs. The Omahas believe that, if anybody touched an article of food exposed at a grave, “the ghost would snatch away the food and paralyse the mouth of the thief, and twist his face out of shape for the rest of his life; or else he would be pursued by the ghost, and food would lose its taste, and hunger ever after haunt the offender.”198 The Brazilian Coroados “avoid disturbing the repository of the dead, for fear they should appear to them and torment them.”199 The Maoris suppose that the violation of a burial place would bring disease and death on the criminal.200 The extreme dislike of the Chinese to disturbing a grave is based on the supposition that the spirit of the person buried will haunt and cause ill-luck or death to the disturber.201 According to the popular beliefs of the Magyars, he who seizes upon anything belonging to a tomb, even if it were only a flower, will be unhappy for the rest of his life.202 The Rumanians of Transylvania think that a person who picks a flower which grows on a grave will die in consequence, and that he who smells at such a flower will lose his sense of smell.203

The transgression of ancestral custom, as we have already seen, is supposed to be punished by the spirits of the dead; and the sacredness of a will largely springs from superstitious fear. The South Slavonian belief that, if a son does not fulfil the last will of his father the soul of the father will curse him from the grave,204 has its counterpart in the denunciatory clause in Anglo-Saxon landbooks, which usually curses all and singular who attack the donee’s title.205

The custom of praising the dead, again, is mainly flattery, and the lamentations over them are not altogether sincere.206 By their excessive demonstrations of grief the Andaman Islanders hope to conciliate the spirits of the departed, and to be preserved from many misfortunes which might otherwise befall them.207 The Central Australian native fears “that, unless a sufficient amount of grief be displayed, he will be harmed by the offended Ulthana or spirit of the dead man.”208 The Angmagsaliks on the East Coast of Greenland say that they cry and groan and perform other mourning rites “in order to prevent the dead from getting angry.”209 But the loud wailing of mourners may also, like the shouting after a death,210 be intended to drive away the ghost, or perhaps death itself.

Fear is certainly a very common motive for funeral and mourning rites which have been interpreted as duties to the dead. This is the case with the various methods of disposing of the corpse. Thus the custom of leaving it as food for beasts of prey211 is, in some instances at least, deliberately practised for the purpose of preventing the ghost from walking. The Herero who accompanied Chapman said of two of their sick comrades who formed part of the company, “You must throw them away, and let the wolves eat them; then they won’t come and bother us.”212 Cremation, also, has frequently been resorted to as a means of protecting the living from unwelcome visits of the dead, or, as the case may be, of effectually getting rid of the contagion of death.213 The Vedic people, while burning the corpses of their dead, cried aloud, “Away, go away, O Death! injure not our sons and our men.”214 In Northern India the corpses of all low caste people are either cremated or buried face downwards, in order to prevent the evil spirit from escaping and troubling its neighbours.215 The Nâyars of Malabar not only believe that the collection and careful disposal of the ashes of the dead man gives peace to his spirit, but, “what is more important, the pacified spirit will not thereafter injure the living members of the Taravâd (house or family), cause miscarriage to the women, possess the men, as with an evil spirit, and so on.”216 In Tibet a ghost which makes its presence felt in dreams or by causing deliriousness or temporary insanity is disposed of by cremation.217 In his description of the Savage Islanders, Mr. Thomson tells us of a mother who destroyed her own daughter’s grave by fire in order to burn the spirit which was afflicting her.218 Among the ancient Scandinavians the bodies of persons who were believed to walk after death were dug up from their graves and burned.219 And exactly the same is done in Albania to this day.220

Burial itself has served a similar purpose.221 According to the Danish traveller Monrad, the Negroes of Accra expressly believe that by covering the body of a dead person with earth they keep the ghost from walking and causing trouble to the survivors; and he adds that exactly the same superstition prevails in Jutland in Denmark.222 This belief is also preserved in the Swedish word for committing a corpse to the earth, jordfästa, which literally means “to fasten to the earth.” In Gothland, in Sweden, there was an old tradition of a man called Takstein who in his lifetime was overbearing and cruel and after his death haunted the living, in consequence of which “a wizard finally earth-fastened him in such a manner that he afterwards lay quiet.”223 But burial has often been supplemented by other precautions against the return of the ghost. Högström says that the Laplanders carefully wrapped up their dead in cloth so as to prevent the soul from slipping away.224 The practice of placing logs or stones immediately over the corpse may have a similar origin; in some Queensland tribes, when an individual has been killed by the whole tribe in punishment for some serious crime, boomerangs are substituted for the ordinary logs, evidently for fear of the ghost.225 The Chuvashes, again, put two stakes across the coffin of a dead man for the purpose of preventing him from lifting up the cover.226 Graves are often provided with mounds, tombstones, or enclosures in order to keep the dead from walking.227 The Omahas raise no mound over a man who has been killed by lightning, but bury him face downwards and with the soles of his feet split, in the belief that he will then go to the spirit-land without giving further trouble to the living.228 The Savage Islanders pile heavy stones upon the grave to keep the ghost down.229 The Cheremises believe that the ghosts cannot step over the fence-poles with which they surround the graves.230 When ceremonies like that of striking the air at a funeral or the ringing of bells are represented as means of keeping off evil spirits from the dead, we have reason to suspect that their original object was to keep off the ghost from the living. At Central Australian funerals women beat the air with the palms of their hands for the express purpose of driving the spirit away from the old camp which it is supposed to haunt, and the men beat the air with their spear-throwers.231 The Bondeis of East Africa frighten the ghosts by beating drums.232 And at Port Moresby, in New Guinea, when the church bell was first used, the natives thanked the missionaries for having driven off numerous bands of ghosts.233

That the mourning fast is essentially a precaution taken by the survivors, and not a tribute to the dead, is obvious from what has been said in a previous chapter.234 When mourners mutilate, cut, or beat themselves, the original object of their doing so seems often to be to ward off the contagion of death.235 Among the Bedouins of Morocco women at funerals not only scratch their faces, but also rub the wounds with cow-dung, and cow-dung is regarded as a means of purification. The mourning customs of painting the body and of assuming a special costume have been explained as attempts on the part of the survivors to disguise themselves;236 but the latter custom may also have originated in the idea that a mourner is more or less polluted for a certain period and that therefore a dress worn by him then, being a seat of contagion, could not be used afterwards. Egede writes of the Greenlanders, “If they have happened to touch a corpse, they immediately cast away the clothes they have then on; and for this reason they always put on their old clothes when they go to a burying, in which they agree with the Jews.”237 There can, finally, be no doubt that the widespread prohibition of mentioning the name of a dead person238 does not in the first instance arise from respect for the departed, but from fear. To name him is to summon him; the Indians of Washington Territory even change their own names when a relative dies, because “they think the spirits of the dead will come back if they hear the same name called that they were accustomed to hear before death.”239 But apart from this, a dead man’s name itself is probably felt to be defiling, or at all events produces an uncanny association of thought, which even among ourselves makes many people reluctant to mention it.240 And to do so may also be a wrong to other persons who would be endangered thereby. Among the Goajiro Indians of Colombia, to mention a dead man before his relatives is a dreadful offence, which is often punished even with death.241

By all this I certainly do not mean to assert that the funeral and mourning customs to which I have just referred have exclusively or in every case originated in fear of the dead or of the pollution of death. Burial may also be genuinely intended to protect the body from beasts or birds; and the same may be the case with mounds, tombstones, and enclosures.242 Some savages are reported to burn the dead in order to prevent their bodies from falling into the hands of enemies,243 which might be bad both for the dead and for their friends, as charms might be made from the corpses.244 Moreover, cremation does away with the slow process of transformation to which a dead body is naturally subject, and this process is regarded not only as a danger to the living but also as painful to the deceased himself.245 The same object may be achieved by exposing the corpse to wild animals. And we should also remember that the putrefactive process itself, whether accompanied by any superstitious ideas or not, is a sufficient motive for disposing of the dead body in some way or other—either by burial or cremation or exposure; and if one method is held objectionable another will be resorted to. Among the Masai the custom of throwing away corpses is said to spring from the notion that to bury them would be to poison the soil;246 and the Zoroastrian law enjoining the exposure of the dead was closely connected with the sacredness ascribed to fire and earth and the consequent dread of polluting them.

Again, as for the mutilations and self-inflicted wounds which accompany funerals, I have suggested in a previous chapter that they may be partly practised for the purpose of refreshing the departed soul with human blood;247 or, as Dr. Hirn observes, they may be instinctive efforts to procure that relief from overpowering feelings which is afforded by pain and the subsequent exhaustion.248 The reluctance to name the dead may, in some measure, be traced to a natural unwillingness in his old friends to revive past sorrows.249 And with reference to the mourning apparel, Dr. de Groot believes—if rightly or wrongly I am not in a position to decide—that, so far as China is concerned, it originated in the custom of sacrificing to the dead the clothes on one’s own back. He thinks that this explanation is confirmed by the fact that in the age of Confucius it was customary for the mourners to throw off their clothes as far as decency allowed when the corpse was being dressed.250

There are several reasons why practices connected with death which originally sprang from self-regarding motives have come to be enjoined as duties. We have first to remember the various factors mentioned above251 which tend to make self-regarding conduct a matter of moral concern. But in this case the transition from the prudential to the obligatory has been much facilitated by the circumstance that all the acts which a person’s self-interest induces him to perform or to abstain from have direct reference to another individual, and, indeed, to an individual who is supposed to reward benefits bestowed upon him or at all events to resent injuries and neglect. These punishments and rewards sent by the departed soul are all the more readily recognised to be well deserved, as the claims of the dead are similar in nature to those of the living and are at the same time in some degree supported by sympathetic feelings in the survivors. Nor is it difficult to explain why even such practices as are not originally supposed to comfort the dead have assumed the character of duties towards them. The dead are not only beings whom it is dangerous to offend and useful to please, but they are also very easily duped. No wonder therefore that the living are anxious to put the most amiable interpretation upon their conduct, trying to persuade the ghost, as also one another, that they do what they do for his benefit, not for their own. It is better for him to have rest in his grave than to wander about on earth unhappy and homeless. It is better for him to enjoy the heat of the flames than to suffer from the cold of an arctic climate. It is better for him to be eaten by an animal—say, a beautiful dog or a hyæna sent by God—than to lie and rot in the open air. And all the mourning customs, what are they if not tokens of grief? Moreover, if the corpse is not properly disposed of or any funeral or mourning rite calculated to keep off the ghost is not observed, the dead man will easily do harm to the survivors. And does not this indicate that they have been neglectful of their duties to him?

The mixture of sympathy and fear which is at the bottom of the duties to the dead accounts for the fact that these duties are rarely extended to strangers. A departed stranger is not generally an object of either pity or fear. He expects attention from his own people only, he haunts his own home. But he may of course be dangerous to anybody who directly offends him, for instance by inflicting an injury upon his body, or to people who live in the vicinity of his grave. We are told that the Angami Nagas bestow as much care on the tombs of foes who have fallen near their villages as on those of their own warriors.252 So also the differences in the treatment of the dead which depend upon age, sex, and social position are no doubt closely connected with variations in the feelings of sympathy, respect, or fear,253 although in many cases we are unable to explain those differences in detail. Among the Australian natives women and children are said to be interred with little ceremony because they are held to be very inferior to men while alive and consequently are not much feared after death;254 and if in Eastern Central Africa the attention usually bestowed upon the dead is not extended to children which die when four or five days old, the reason seems to be that such children are hardly supposed to possess a soul.255 We may assume that the special treatment to which the bodies of criminals are subject is due not only to indignation but, in some instances at least, to fear of their ghosts. And we have noticed above that suicides, murdered persons, and those struck with lightning are sometimes left unburied because no one dares to interfere with their bodies, or perhaps in order to prevent them from mixing with the other dead.256