Among the Kol tribes this kindly hospitality to ancestral souls passes on into the belief and ceremony of full manes-worship: votive offerings are made to the ‘old folks’ when their descendants go on a journey, and when there is sickness in the family it is generally they who are first propitiated.^[85] Among Turanian races, the Chuwash put food and napkins on the grave, saying, ‘Rise at night and eat your fill, and there ye have napkins to wipe your mouths!’ while the Cheremiss simply said, ‘That is for you, ye dead, there ye have food and drink!’ In this Tatar region we hear of offerings continued year after year, and even of messengers sent back by a horde to carry offerings to the tombs of their forefathers in the old land whence they had emigrated.^[86]

Details of this ancient rite are to be traced from the level of these rude races far upward in civilization. South-East Asia is full of it, and the Chinese may stand as its representative. He keeps his coffined parent for years, serving him with meals as if alive. He summons ancestral souls with prayer and beat of drum to feed on the meat and drink set out on special days when they are thought to return home. He even gives entertainments for the benefit of destitute and unfortunate souls in the lower regions, such as those of lepers and beggars. Lanterns are lighted to show them the way, a feast is spread for them, and with characteristic fancy, some victuals are left over for any blind or feeble spirits who may be late, and a pail of gruel is provided for headless souls, with spoons for them to put it down their throats with. Such proceedings culminate in the so-called Universal Rescue, now and then celebrated, when a little house is built for the expected visitors, with separate accommodation and bath-rooms for male and female ghosts.^[87] The ancient Egyptian would set out his provision of cakes and trussed ducks on reed scaffolds in the tomb, or would even keep the mummy in the house to be present as a guest at the feast, σύνδειπνον καὶ συμπότην ἐποιήσατο, as Lucian says.^[88] The Hindu, as of old, offers to the dead the funeral cakes, places before the door the earthen vessels of water for him to bathe in, of milk for him to drink, and celebrates at new and full moon the solemn presentation of rice-cakes made with ghee, with its attendant ceremonies so important for the soul’s release from its twelvemonth’s sojourn with Yama in Hades, and its transition to the Heaven of the Pitaras, the Fathers.^[89] In the classic world such rites were represented by funeral feasts and oblations of food.^[90]

In Christian times there manifests itself that interesting kind of survival which, keeping up the old ceremony in form, has adapted its motive to new thoughts and feelings. The classic funeral oblations became Christian, the silicernium was succeeded by the feast held at the martyr’s tomb. Faustus inveighs against the Christians for carrying on the ancient rites: ‘Their sacrifices indeed ye have turned into love-feasts, their idols into martyrs whom with like vows ye worship; ye appease the shades of the dead with wine and meals, ye celebrate the Gentiles’ solemn days with them, such as calends and solstices,—of their life certainly ye have changed nought,’^[91] and so forth. The story of Monica shows how the custom of laying food on the tomb for the manes passed into the ceremony, like to it in form, of setting food and drink to be sanctified by the sepulchre of a Christian saint. Saint-Foix, who wrote in the time of Louis XIV., has left us an account of the ceremonial after the death of a King of France, during the forty days before the funeral when his wax effigy lay in state. They continued to serve him at meal-times as though still alive, the officers laid the table, and brought the dishes, the maître d’hôtel handed the napkin to the highest lord present to be presented to the king, a prelate blessed the table, the basins of water were handed to the royal arm-chair, the cup was served in its due course, and grace was said in the accustomed manner, save that there was added to it the De Profundis.^[92] Spaniards still offer bread and wine on the tombs of those they love, on the anniversary of their decease.^[93] The conservative Eastern Church still holds to ancient rite. The funeral feast is served in Russia, with its tables for the beggars, laden with fish pasties and bowls of shchi and jugs of kvas, its more delicate dinner for friends and priests, its incense and chants of ‘everlasting remembrance’; and even the repetition of the festival on the ninth, and twentieth, and fortieth day are not forgotten. The offerings of saucers of kutiya or kolyvo are still made in the church; this used to be of parboiled wheat and was deposited over the body, it is now made of boiled rice and raisins, sweetened with honey. In their usual mystic fashion, the Orthodox Christians now explain away into symbolism this remnant of primitive offering to the dead: the honey is heavenly sweetness, the shrivelled raisins will be full beauteous grapes, the grain typifies the resurrection, ‘that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die.’^[94]

In the calendar of many a people, differing widely as they may in race and civilization, there are to be found special yearly festivals of the dead. Their rites are much the same as those performed on other days for individuals; their season differs in different districts, but seems to have particular associations with harvest-time and the fall of the year, and with the year’s end as reckoned at midwinter or in early spring.^[95] The Karens make their annual offerings to the dead in the ‘month of shades,’ that is, December;^[96] the Kocch of North Bengal every year at harvest-home offer fruits and a fowl to deceased parents;^[97] the Barea of East Africa celebrate in November the feast of Thiyot, at once a feast of general peace and merry-making, of thanksgiving for the harvest, and of memorial for the deceased, for each of whom a little pot-full of beer is set out two days, to be drunk at last by the survivors;^[98] in West Africa we hear of the feast of the dead at the time of yam-harvest;^[99] at the end of the year the Haitian negroes take food to the graves for the shades to eat, ‘manger zombi,’ as they say.^[100] The Roman Feralia and Lemuralia were held in February and May.^[101] In the last five or ten days of their year the Zoroastrians hold their feasts for departed relatives, when souls come back to the world to visit the living, and receive from them offerings of food and clothing.^[102] The custom of setting empty seats at the St. John’s Eve feast, for the departed souls of kinsfolk, is said to have lasted on in Europe to the seventeenth century. Spring is the season of the time-honoured Slavonic rite of laying food on the graves of the dead. The Bulgarians hold a feast in the cemetery on Palm Sunday, and, after much eating and drinking, leave the remains upon the graves of their friends, who, they are persuaded, will eat them during the night. In Russia such scenes may still be watched on the two appointed days called Parents’ Days. The higher classes have let the rite sink to prayer at the graves of lost relatives, and giving alms to the beggars who flock to the cemeteries. But the people still ‘howl’ for the dead, and set out on their graves a handkerchief for a tablecloth, with gingerbread, eggs, curd-tarts, and even vodka, on it; when the weeping is over, they eat up the food, especially commemorating the dead in Russian manner by partaking of his favourite dainty, and if he were fond of a glass, the vodka is sipped with the ejaculation, ‘The Kingdom of Heaven be his! He loved a drink, the deceased!’^[103] When Odilo, Abbot of Cluny, at the end of the tenth century, instituted the celebration of All Souls’ Day (November 2),^[104] he set on foot one of those revivals which have so often given the past a new lease of life. The Western Church at large took up the practice, and round it there naturally gathered surviving remnants of the primitive rite of banquets to the dead. The accusation against the early Christians, that they appeased the shades of the dead with feasts like the Gentiles, would not be beside the mark now, fifteen hundred years later. On the eve of All Souls’ begins, within the limits of Christendom, a commemoration of the dead which combines some touches of pathetic imagination with relics of savage animism scarcely to be surpassed in Africa or the South Sea Islands. In Italy the day is given to feasting and drinking in honour of the dead, while skulls and skeletons in sugar and paste form appropriate children’s toys. In Tyrol, the poor souls released from purgatory fire for the night may come and smear their burns with the melted fat of the ‘soul light’ on the hearth, or cakes are left for them on the table, and the room is kept warm for their comfort. Even in Paris the souls of the departed come to partake of the food of the living. In Brittany the crowd pours into the churchyard at evening, to kneel bareheaded at the graves of dead kinsfolk, to fill the hollow of the tombstone with holy water, or to pour libations of milk upon it. All night the church bells clang, and sometimes a solemn procession of the clergy goes round to bless the graves. In no household that night is the cloth removed, for the supper must be left for the souls to come and take their part, nor must the fire be put out, where they will come to warm themselves. And at last, as the inmates retire to rest, there is heard at the door a doleful chant—it is the souls, who, borrowing the voices of the parish poor, have come to ask the prayers of the living.^[105]

If we ask how the spirits of the dead are in general supposed to feed on the viands set before them, we come upon difficult questions, which will be met with again in discussing the theory of sacrifice. Even where the thought is certainly that the departed soul eats, this thought may be very indefinite, with far less of practical intention in it than of childish make-believe. Now and then, however, the sacrificers themselves offer closer definitions of their meaning. The idea of the ghost actually devouring the material food is not unexampled. Thus, in North America, Algonquin Indians considered that the shadow-like souls of the dead can still eat and drink, often even telling Father Le Jeune that they had found in the morning meat gnawed in the night by the souls. More recently, we read that some Potawatomis will leave off providing the supply of food at the grave if it lies long untouched, it being concluded that the dead no longer wants it, but has found a rich hunting-ground in the other world.^[106] In Africa, again, Father Cavazzi records of the Congo people furnishing their dead with supplies of provisions, that they could not be persuaded that souls did not consume material food.^[107] In Europe the Esths, offering food for the dead on All Souls’, are said to have rejoiced if they found in the morning that any of it was gone.^[108] A less gross conception is that the soul consumes the steam or savour of the food, or its essence or spirit. It is said to have been with such purpose that the Maoris placed food by the dead man’s side, and some also with him in the grave.^[109] The idea is well displayed among the natives in Mexican districts, where the souls who came to the annual feast are described as hovering over and smelling the food set out for them, or sucking out its nutritive quality.^[110] The Hindu entreats the manes to quaff the sweet essence of the offered food; thinking on them, he slowly sets the dish of rice before the Brahmans, and while they silently eat the hot food, the ancestral spirits take their part of the feast.^[111] At the old Slavonic meals for the dead, we read of the survivors sitting in silence and throwing morsels under the table, fancying that they could hear the spirits rustle, and see them feed on the smell and steam of the viands. One account describes the mourners at the funeral banquet inviting in the departed soul thought to be standing outside the door, and every guest throwing morsels and pouring drink under the table, for him to refresh himself. What lay on the ground was not picked up, but was left for friendless and kinless souls. When the meal was over, the priest rose from table, swept out the house, and hunted out the souls of the dead ‘like fleas,’ with these words, ‘Ye have eaten and drunken, souls, now go, now go!’^[112] Many travellers have described the imagination with which the Chinese make such offerings. It is that the spirits of the dead consume the impalpable essence of the food, leaving behind its coarse material substance, wherefore the dutiful sacrificers, having set out sumptuous feasts for ancestral souls, allow them a proper time to satisfy their appetite, and then fall to themselves.^[113] The Jesuit Father Christoforo Borri suggestively translates the native idea into his own scholastic phraseology. In Cochin China, according to him, people believed ‘that the souls of the dead have need of corporeal sustenance and maintenance, wherefore several times a year, according to their custom, they make splendid and sumptuous banquets, children to their deceased parents, husbands to their wives, friends to their friends, waiting a long while for the dead guest to come and sit down at table to eat.’ The missionaries argued against this proceeding, but were met by ridicule of their ignorance, and the reply ‘that there were two things in the food, one the substance, and the other the accidents of quantity, quality, smell, taste, and the like. The immaterial souls of the dead, taking for themselves the substance of the food, which being immaterial is food suited to the incorporeal soul, left only in the dishes the accidents which corporeal senses perceive; for this the dead had no need of corporeal instruments, as we have said.’ Thereupon the Jesuit proceeds to remark, as to the prospect of conversion of these people, ‘it may be judged from the distinction they make between the accidents and the substance of the food which they prepare for the dead,’ that it will not be very difficult to prove to them the mystery of the Eucharist.^[114] Now to peoples among whom prevails the rite of feasts of the dead, whether they offer the food in mere symbolic pretence, or whether they consider the souls really to feed on it in this spiritual way (as well as in the cases inextricably mixed up with these, where the offering is spiritually conveyed away to the world of spirits), it can be of little consequence what becomes of the gross material food. When the Kafir sorcerer, in cases of sickness, declares that the shades of ancestors demand a particular cow, the beast is slaughtered and left shut up for a time for the shades to eat, or for its spirit to go to the land of shades, and then is taken out to be eaten by the sacrificers.^[115] So, in more civilized Japan, when the survivors have placed their offering of unboiled rice and water in a hollow made for the purpose in a stone of the tomb, it seems to them no matter that the poor or the birds really carry off the grain.^[116]

Such rites as these are especially exposed to dwindle in survival. The offerings of meals and feasts to the dead may be traced at their last stage into mere traditional ceremonies, at most tokens of affectionate remembrance of the dead, or works of charity to the living. The Roman Feralia in Ovid’s time were a striking example of such transition, for while the idea was recognized that the ghosts fed upon the offerings, ‘nunc posito pascitur umbra cibo,’ yet there were but ‘parva munera,’ fruits and grains of salt, and corn soaked in wine, set out for their meal in the middle of the road. ‘Little the manes ask, the pious thought stands instead of the rich gift, for Styx holds no greedy gods:’—

Still farther back, in old Chinese history, Confucius had been called on to give an opinion as to the sacrifices to the dead. Maintainer of all ancient rites as he was, he stringently kept up this, ‘he sacrificed to the dead as if they were present,’ but when he was asked if the dead had knowledge of what was done or no, he declined to answer the question; for if he replied yes, then dutiful descendants would injure their substance by sacrifices, and if no, then undutiful children would leave their parents unburied. The evasion was characteristic of the teacher who expressed his theory of worship in this maxim, ‘to give oneself earnestly to the duties due to men, and, while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them, may be called wisdom.’ It is said that in our own time the Taepings have made a step beyond Confucius; they have forbidden the sacrifices to the spirits of the dead, yet keep up the rite of visiting their tombs on the customary day, for prayer and the renewal of vows.^[118] How funeral offerings may pass into commemorative banquets and feasts to the poor, has been shown already. If we seek in England for vestiges of the old rite of funeral sacrifice, we may find a lingering survival into modern centuries, doles of bread and drink given to the poor at funerals, and ‘soul-mass cakes’ which peasant girls perhaps to this day beg for at farmhouses with the traditional formula,

Were it not for our knowledge of the intermediate stages through which these fragments of old custom have come down, it would seem far-fetched indeed to trace their origin back to the savage and barbaric times of the institution of feasts of departed souls.